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Session: Extragalactic Astronomy and Astrophysics

Name: Dr. Panos Charalampopoulos (University of Turku)
Coauthors: No coauthors were included.
Type: Oral
Title: Modeling the polarized light of Tidal Disruption Events
Abstract:

Tidal disruption events (TDEs) occur in the nuclei of galaxies, when a star is tidally destroyed by a supermassive black hole (SMBH). TDEs are being observed across the electromagnetic spectrum and their properties are highly diverse, making the origin of the optical luminosity a mystery and leading to different scenarios for the underlying emission mechanism. Even though most of them are observed in the optical regime, polarimetric observations of optical TDEs have been very scarce until now. More recently, polarimetric observations of TDEs started to take place and the first sample study of polarization from optical TDEs was published. The nascent field of optical TDE polarimetry calls for theoretical interpretation and in this talk I will present such a work, using the 3-D Monte Carlo radiative transfer code POSSIS and the collision-induced outflow (CIO) TDE emission scenario, in order to model the continuum polarization levels of TDEs. We find that the polarization depends strongly on the optical depths at the central regions and the viewing angle. Finally, by comparing our model predictions to polarization observations of a few TDEs, we attempt to constrain their observed viewing angles and we show that multi-epoch polarimetric observations can become a key factor in constraining the viewing angle of TDEs.