Measuring Black Hole Masses from Tidal Disruption Events and Testing the M BH –σ * Relation

Abstract

Liu and collaborators recently proposed an elliptical accretion disk model for tidal disruption events (TDEs). They showed that the accretion disks of optical/UV TDEs are large and highly eccentric and suggested that the broad optical emission lines with complex and diverse profiles originate in a cool eccentric accretion disk of random inclination and orientation. In this paper, we calculate the radiation efficiency of the elliptical accretion disk and investigate the implications for observations of TDEs. We compile observational data for the peak bolometric luminosity and total radiation energy after peak brightness of 18 TDE sources and compare these data to the predictions from the elliptical accretion disk model. Our results show that the observations are consistent with the theoretical predictions and that the majority of the orbital energy of the stellar debris is advected into the black hole (BH) without being converted into radiation. Furthermore, we derive the masses of the disrupted stars and the masses of the BHs of the TDEs. The BH masses obtained in this paper are also consistent with those calculated with the M BH – σ * relation. Our results provide an effective method for measuring the masses of BHs in large numbers of TDEs to be discovered in ongoing and next-generation sky surveys, regardless of whether the BHs are located at the centers of galactic nuclei or wander in disks and halos.