Limits on mass outflow from optical tidal disruption events (2009.01240v2)

Abstract: The discovery of optical/UV tidal disruption events (TDEs) was surprising. The expectation was that, upon returning to the pericenter, the stellar-debris stream will form a compact disk that will emit soft X-rays. Indeed the first TDEs were discovered in this energy band. A common explanation for the optical/UV events is that surrounding optically-thick matter reprocesses the disk's X-ray emission and emits it from a large photosphere. If accretion follows the super-Eddington mass infall rate it would inevitably result in an energetic outflow, providing naturally the reprocessing matter. We describe here a new method to estimate, using the observed luminosity and temperature, the mass and energy of outflows from optical transients. When applying this method to a sample of supernovae our estimates are consistent with a more detailed hydrodynamic modeling. For the current sample of a few dozen optical TDEs the observed luminosity and temperature imply outflows that are significantly more massive than typical stellar masses, posing a problem to this common reprocessing picture.