Tidal disruption event discs around supermassive black holes: disc warp and inclination evolution

Abstract

ABSTRACT After the tidal disruption event (TDE) of a star around a supermassive black hole (SMBH), the bound stellar debris rapidly forms an accretion disc. If the accretion disc is not aligned with the spinning SMBH’s equatorial plane, the disc will be driven into Lense–Thirring precession around the SMBH’s spin axis, possibly affecting the TDE’s light curve. We carry out an eigenmode analysis of such a disc to understand how the disc’s warp structure, precession, and inclination evolution are influenced by the disc’s and SMBH’s properties. We find an oscillatory warp may develop as a result of strong non-Keplarian motion near the SMBH. The global disc precession frequency matches the Lense–Thirring precession frequency of a rigid disc around a spinning black hole within a factor of a few when the disc’s accretion rate is high, but deviates significantly at low accretion rates. Viscosity aligns the disc with the SMBH’s equatorial plane over time-scales of days to years, depending on the disc’s accretion rate, viscosity, and SMBH’s mass. We also examine the effect of fallback material on the warp evolution of TDE discs, and find that the fallback torque aligns the TDE disc with the SMBH’s equatorial plane in a few to tens of days for the parameter space investigated. Our results place constraints on models of TDE emission which rely on the changing disc orientation with respect to the line of sight to explain observations.