{"about":{"site":"https://codewithpapers.app","non_affiliation":"Code with Papers and Syntology are not affiliated with, endorsed by, or sponsored by Papers with Code, Meta, or the pwc-archive mirror.","licence":"CC BY-SA 4.0","licence_url":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/legalcode","attribution":"https://codewithpapers.app/attribution","modified":"archive material modified by Syntology; see the attribution page"},"url":"/paper/tidal-disruption-event-discs-are-larger-than","title":"Tidal disruption event discs are larger than they seem: removing systematic biases in TDE X-ray spectral modelling","arxiv_id":"2108.10160","date":"2021-08-23","proceeding":null,"authors":["Andrew Mummery"],"abstract":"The physical sizes of TDE accretion discs are regularly inferred, from the modelling of the TDEs X-ray spectrum as a single temperature blackbody, to be smaller than the plausible event horizons of the black holes which they occur around - a clearly unphysical result. In this Letter we demonstrate that the use of single-temperature blackbody functions results in the systematic underestimation of TDE accretion disc sizes by as much as an order-of-magnitude. In fact, the radial `size' inferred from fitting a single temperature blackbody to an observed accretion disc X-ray spectrum does not even positively correlate with the physical size of that accretion disc. We further demonstrate that the disc-observer inclination angle and absorption of X-ray photons may both lead to additional underestimation of the radial sizes of TDE discs, but by smaller factors. To rectify these issues we present a new fitting function which accurately reproduces the size of an accretion disc from its 0.3-10 keV X-ray spectrum. Unlike traditional approaches, this new fitting function does not assume that the accretion disc has reached a steady state configuration, an assumption which is unlikely to be satisfied by most TDEs. An XSPEC implementation of this new fitting function is available at github.com/andymummeryastro/TDEdiscXraySpectrum.","url_abs":"https://arxiv.org/abs/2108.10160v1","url_pdf":"https://arxiv.org/pdf/2108.10160v1.pdf","source":{"archive":"pwc-archive (Hugging Face), CC BY-SA 4.0","snapshot":"2025-07-28","licence_url":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/legalcode","row_kind":"links_only","authors_date_abstract":"arXiv metadata, CC0 1.0 (https://info.arxiv.org/help/license), from the Kaggle arXiv metadata snapshot of 2026-09-12"},"code_links":[{"paper_slug":"tidal-disruption-event-discs-are-larger-than","repo_url":"https://github.com/andymummeryastro/TDEdiscXraySpectrum","is_official":1,"mentioned_in_paper":1,"mentioned_in_github":0,"framework":"none","reach":null}],"tasks":[],"methods":[],"datasets_introduced":[],"methods_introduced":[],"results":[],"syntology":{"syntology_url":null,"atlas_url":null,"mcp":null,"developers":"https://syntology.ai/developers"},"arxiv_metadata":null,"syntology_extracted_results":null}