Collaborative Research: Tidal Disruption of Stars by Massive Black Holes

合作研究：巨大黑洞对恒星的潮汐扰动

• 批准号: 2206471
• 负责人: Alexander Chekhovskoy
• 金额: $ 31.49万
• 依托单位: Northwestern University
• 依托单位国家: 美国
• 项目类别: Standard Grant
• 财政年份: 2022
• 资助国家: 美国
• 起止时间: 2022-09-01 至 2025-08-31
• 项目状态: 未结题
• 来源: https://www.nsf.gov/awardsearch/showAward?AWD_ID=2206471&HistoricalAwards=false
• 关键词: Collaborative; Research; Tidal; Disruption; Stars

The disruption and subsequent accretion of stars by super-massive black holes (SMBHs) has been linked to many luminous flares observed in the nuclei of nearby galaxies. Our theoretical understanding of these tidal disruption events (TDEs), however, remains incomplete. A research collaboration between the University of California Santa Cruz, the University of California Berkeley, and Northwestern University will bring together experts in different fields of physics: hydrodynamics, general relatively and radiative transfer to address important gaps in our understanding of TDEs. This understanding requires a multi-pronged approach that attempts to resolve the underlying physics at a wide range of physical and temporal scales. The phenomena of TDEs provide an exciting opportunity to study the size of SMBHs in quiescent galaxies, the stellar populations and dynamics in galactic nuclei, and the physics of black hole accretion under well-defined conditions. Whereas active galactic nuclei may be supplied by a steady stream of fuel for thousands of years, TDEs offer a unique opportunity to study a single SMBH when the mass accretion rates and feeding timescales change over days or months. The project will also include an education and public outreach program which aims to cross-fertilize the training of computational scientists and students in the visual arts and digital media using state-of-art simulations as common ground in a group environment that significantly increases the number of under-represented students trained in computational astrophysics. To do this, the astronomers will partner with university arts and education programs and with local schools. Wide-field transient surveys are currently delivering more and better data on TDEs. Fully three-dimensional simulations of accretion disks are computationally expensive, and as a result there is trade-off between running a simulation with significant resolution that only resolves a fraction of the disk and global simulations at moderate resolution that resolve the full structure. For TDEs the trade-offs are even more pronounced and require a large range of scales to be resolved simultaneously. As a consequence, running a single simulation of the full problem incorporating all of the aforementioned effects would not only be prohibitive, but also difficult to interpret because of the complexity of the interplay between the various physical mechanisms at different scales. As an alternative, the investigators will aim to answer these questions via a series of numerical experiments that isolate the key processes that regulate the disruption itself, the formation of the debris disk, the production of jets and the generation of the emanating radiation. In addition to being computationally feasible, this approach will enable a thorough understanding of each of the processes, which are likely highly reminiscent of the well-studied phenomenology of steadily-accreting AGN.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.

超质量黑洞（SMBHS）对恒星的破坏和随后的积聚与在附近星系的核中观察到的许多发光耀斑有关。但是，我们对这些潮汐破坏事件（TDE）的理论理解仍然不完整。加利福尼亚大学圣克鲁斯分校，加利福尼亚大学伯克利分校和西北大学之间的研究合作将汇集不同物理学领域的专家：流体动力学，一般和辐射的转移，以解决我们对TDES的理解中的重要差距。这种理解需要一种多管齐下的方法，该方法试图在各种物理和时间尺度上解决基础物理学。 TDE的现象为研究静态星系中的SMBH的大小，银河系核中的恒星种群和动力学以及在明确定义的条件下的黑洞积聚物理学提供了一个令人兴奋的机会。虽然活跃的银河核可以由数千年来稳定的燃料流提供，但TDE提供了一个独特的机会来研究单个SMBH，当质量积聚率和喂养时间标准在几天或几个月内变化。 该项目还将包括一项教育和公共宣传计划，该计划旨在通过在小组环境中使用最先进的模拟来跨批准视觉艺术和数字媒体的计算科学家和学生的培训，从而大大增加了在计算天体物体中受过培训的代表性不足的学生的数量。 为此，天文学家将与大学艺术和教育计划以及当地学校合作。广阔的瞬态调查目前正在提供有关TDE的更多和更好的数据。 对积聚磁盘的完全三维模拟在计算上是昂贵的，因此，在运行具有大量分辨率的模拟之间进行了权衡，该模拟只能解决磁盘的一小部分和以中等分辨率的全局模拟来解决完整结构。对于TDE，权衡更为明显，需要同时解决大量尺度。结果，对整个上述效应的完整问题进行单个模拟不仅会令人难以置信，而且由于不同尺度上各种物理机制之间相互作用的复杂性而难以解释。作为替代方案，研究人员将旨在通过一系列数值实验来回答这些问题，这些实验隔离了调节破坏本身的关键过程，碎屑磁盘的形成，喷气机的产生以及发射辐射的产生。除了在计算上可行外，这种方法还将能够对每个过程进行彻底的了解，这可能使人想起稳定良好的AGN的精心研究的现象学现象学。这项奖项反映了NSF的法定任务，并通过使用该基金会的知识分子优点和广泛的影响来评估NSF的法定任务，并被认为是值得的。