Estimation of the jet inclination angle for the TDE Swift J1644+57

Abstract

ABSTRACT An estimate of the jet inclination angle relative to the accreting black hole’s spin can be useful to probe the jet triggering mechanism and the disc–jet coupling. A tidal disruption event (TDE) of a star by a supermassive spinning black hole provides an excellent astrophysical laboratory to study the jet direction through the possibility of jet precession. In this work, we report a new method to constrain the jet inclination angle β and apply it to the well-sampled jetted TDE Swift J1644+57. This method involves X-ray data analysis and comparisons of jet models with broad properties of the observed X-ray dips, to estimate the upper limit of the extent of the contribution of a plausible jet precession to these X-ray dips. From this limit, we find that β is very likely to be less than ∼15° for Swift J1644+57. Such a well-constrained jet inclination angle could be useful to probe the jet physics. The main advantage of our method is that it does not need to assume an origin of the observed X-ray dips, and the conclusion does not depend on any particular type of jet precession (e.g. the one due to the Lense–Thirring effect) or any specific value of precession frequency or any particular jet model. These make this method reliable and applicable to other jetted TDEs, as well as to other jetted accreting systems.