Title
Simulating black hole white dwarf encounters
Abstract
The existence of supermassive black holes lurking in the centers of galaxies and of stellar binary systems containing a black hole with a few solar masses has been established beyond reasonable doubt. The idea that black holes of intermediate masses (∼1000M⊙) may exist in globular star clusters has gained credence over recent years but no conclusive evidence has been established yet. An attractive feature of this hypothesis is the potential to not only disrupt solar-type stars but also compact white dwarf stars. In close encounters the white dwarfs can be sufficiently compressed to thermonuclearly explode. The detection of an underluminous thermonuclear explosion accompanied by a soft, transient X-ray signal would be compelling evidence for the presence of intermediate mass black holes in stellar clusters. In this paper we focus on the numerical techniques used to simulate the entire disruption process from the initial parabolic orbit, over the nuclear energy release during tidal compression, the subsequent ejection of freshly synthesized material and the formation process of an accretion disk around the black hole.
Year
DOI
Venue
2008
10.1016/j.cpc.2008.01.031
Computer Physics Communications
Keywords
Field
DocType
Meshfree Lagrangian hydrodynamics,Nuclear reactions,Reactive flows,Black holes
Astronomy,Astrophysics,Black dwarf,Gamma-ray burst progenitors,Future of an expanding universe,Intermediate-mass black hole,Stellar black hole,Black hole,Supermassive black hole,Binary black hole,Physics
Journal
Volume
Issue
ISSN
179
1
0010-4655
Citations 
PageRank 
References 
1
0.37
0
Authors
4
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
Stephan Rosswog1141.53
Enrico Ramirez-Ruiz210.37
W. Raphael Hix310.37
M. Dan410.37