Insights into tidal disruption of stars from PS1-10jh
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Was PS1-10jh, an optical/ultraviolet transient discovered by the Pan-STARRS Medium Deep Survey, the tidal disruption of a star by a massive black hole (BH)? We address two aspects of the problem: the composition of the putative disrupted object (using the spectroscopic data), and the energetics of the observed gas and radiation (using the photometric data). We perform photoionization calculations and compare with the observed lower limit of the line ratio |$L_{\rm He\,\small {II}\,\, 4686}/L_{\rm H\alpha }>5$| to argue that this event was not the disruption of a solar-type star, and instead was likely the disruption of a helium core (as first proposed by Gezari et al.). Disruption of such a dense object requires a relatively small central BH, MBH ≲ 2 × 105 M⊙. We use the photometric data to infer that PS1-10jh comprised an outflow of ∼0.01 M⊙ of gas, escaping from the BH at ∼1000 km s−1, and we propose that this outflow was driven primarily by radiation pressure trapped by Thomson and resonance line scattering. The large ratio of radiated energy to kinetic energy, Erad/EK ∼ 104, together with the large value of Erad ∼ 2 × 1051 erg, suggests that the outflow was shocked at large radius (perhaps similar to superluminous supernovae or the internal shock model for gamma-ray bursts). We describe puzzles in the physics of PS1-10jh, and discuss how this event may help us understand future tidal disruptions and super-Eddington accretion events as well.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".