Consequences of Strong Compression in Tidal Disruption Events
The dynamics of stellar tidal disruption depend strongly on how deeply the victim star’s orbit plunges into the tidal sphere. In this Chapter, we show that most previous estimates of the spread in debris energy, \(\Updelta \epsilon\), are inaccurate when \(\beta=R_{\rm t}/R_{\rm p}> 1\); the traditional formula for \(\Updelta \epsilon\) can be incorrect by orders of magnitude for high β events. After presenting a revised formula that is independent of β and correct to leading order, we develop a new analytic model for tidal disruption events (TDEs) and employ this to test our conclusion that \(\Updelta\epsilon\) does not depend on β.