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INTERRUPTION OF TIDAL-DISRUPTION FLARES BY SUPERMASSIVE BLACK HOLE BINARIES

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F. K. Liu1,2, S. Li1 and Xian Chen1,3

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Supermassive black hole binaries (SMBHBs) are products of galaxy mergers, and are important in testing Λ cold dark matter cosmology and locating gravitational-wave-radiation sources. A unique electromagnetic signature of SMBHBs in galactic nuclei is essential in identifying the binaries in observations from the IR band through optical to X-ray. Recently, the flares in optical, UV, and X-ray caused by supermassive black holes (SMBHs) tidally disrupting nearby stars have been successfully used to observationally probe single SMBHs in normal galaxies. In this Letter, we investigate the accretion of the gaseous debris of a tidally disrupted star by a SMBHB. Using both stability analysis of three-body systems and numerical scattering experiments, we show that the accretion of stellar debris gas, which initially decays with time vpropt –5/3, would stop at a time T tr sime ηT b. Here, η ~ 0.25 and T b is the orbital period of the SMBHB. After a period of interruption, the accretion recurs discretely at time T r sime ξT b, where ξ ~ 1. Both η and ξ sensitively depend on the orbital parameters of the tidally disrupted star at the tidal radius and the orbit eccentricity of SMBHB. The interrupted accretion of the stellar debris gas gives rise to an interrupted tidal flare, which could be used to identify SMBHBs in non-active galaxies in the upcoming transient surveys.


Keywords

accretion, accretion disks; black hole physics; galaxies: active; galaxies: evolution; galaxies: nuclei; gravitational waves


PACS

98.62.Js Galactic nuclei (including black holes), circumnuclear matter, and bulges

97.30.Nr Flare stars (UV Ceti, RS Canum Venaticorum, FU Orionis, R Coronae Borealis variables, etc.)

98.80.-k Cosmology

98.62.Mw Infall, accretion, and accretion disks

98.65.Fz Galaxy mergers, collisions, and tidal interactions

97.80.-d Binary and multiple stars

Subjects

Gravitation and cosmology

Astrophysics and astroparticles

Dates

Issue 1 (2009 November 20)

Received 2009 August 31, accepted for publication 2009 October 20

Published 2009 November 3



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