Rates of Stellar Tidal Disruption Events Around Intermediate-Mass Black Holes

• Main Authors: Chang, Janet N. Y, Dai, Lixin, Pfister, Hugo, Chowdhury, Rudrani Kar, Natarajan, Priyamvada
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: 12.07.2024
• Subjects: Physics - High Energy Astrophysical Phenomena
• DOI: 10.48550/arxiv.2407.09339

Rates of stellar tidal disruption events (TDEs) around supermassive black holes (SMBHs) have been extensively calculated using the loss cone theory, while theoretical work on TDE rates around intermediate-mass black holes (IMBHs) has been lacking. In this work, we aim to accurately calculate the IMBH TDE rates based on their black hole masses and the stellar profiles of their host galaxies obtained from the latest observations. We find that IMBH TDEs from the center of small galaxies have an overall rate comparable to SMBH TDEs, while off-nuclei IMBH TDEs from globular clusters have a much lower rate. Very interestingly, we show that the rate of IMBH TDE per galaxy generally increases with the black hole mass, which is opposite to the trend seen in SMBH TDEs. Furthermore, we report that IMBH TDEs typically occur in the pinhole regime, which means that deeply plunging events are more likely for IMBH TDEs compared to SMBH TDEs. We also calculate the volumetric TDE rates for IMBH and SMBH TDEs and compare with observed rates.