The impact of tidal disruption events on galactic habitability

@article{Pacetti2020TheIO,
  title={The impact of tidal disruption events on galactic habitability},
  author={Emily Garr Pacetti and Amedeo Balbi and Manasvi Lingam and Francesco Tombesi and Eric S. Perlman},
  journal={Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society},
  year={2020}
}
Tidal disruption events (TDEs) are characterized by the emission of a short burst of high-energy radiation. We analyse the cumulative impact of TDEs on galactic habitability using the Milky Way as a proxy. We show that X-rays and extreme ultraviolet radiation emitted during TDEs can cause hydrodynamic escape and instigate biological damage. By taking the appropriate variables into consideration, such as the efficiency of atmospheric escape and distance from the Galactic centre, we demonstrate… 
View PDF on arXiv
4 Citations
Background Citations
1

Figures from this paper

4 Citations

The best place and time to live in the Milky Way

Context. Counted among the most powerful cosmic events, supernovae (SNe) and γ-ray bursts (GRBs) can be highly disruptive for life: Their radiation can be harmful for biota or induce extinction by…

Constraints on the Abundance of 0.01 c Stellar Engines in the Milky Way

Stellar engines are hypothesized megastructures that extract energy from the host star, typically with the purpose of generating thrust and accelerating the stellar system. We explore the maximum…

Polarized Radiation and the Emergence of Biological Homochirality on Earth and Beyond

It has been proposed that spin-polarized cosmic radiation can induce asymmetric changes in helical biopolymers that may account for the emergence of biological homochirality. The parity violation in…

Why We Should Take Interstellar Panspermia Seriously

  • A. Balbi
  • Physics
    Planet Formation and Panspermia
  • 2021

References

SHOWING 1-10 OF 59 REFERENCES

Galactic Effects on Habitability

The galactic environment has been suspected to influence planetary habitability in many ways. Very metal-poor regions of the Galaxy, or those largely devoid of atoms more massive than H and He, are…

The habitability of the Milky Way during the active phase of its central supermassive black hole

The extent to which the activity of the supermassive black hole at the center of the Milky Way, known as Sagittarius A* (Sgr A*), may have affected the habitability of Earth-like planets in the authors' Galaxy is quantified.

The Habitability of Our Evolving Galaxy

Astrophysical ionizing radiation and Earth: a brief review and census of intermittent intense sources.

This review estimates the intensities and rates of occurrence of many kinds of strong radiation bursts by astrophysical entities, ranging from gamma-ray bursts at cosmological distances to the Sun itself, and notes for the first time that so-called "short-hard" gamma-rays bursts are a substantial threat, comparable in magnitude to supernovae and greater than that of the higher-luminosity long bursts considered in most past work.

On the Missing Energy Puzzle of Tidal Disruption Events

For the majority of tidal disruption event (TDE) candidates, the observed energy in the optical/near-UV bands is of order 1051 erg. We show that this observed energy is smaller than the minimum…

Evaluating galactic habitability using high-resolution cosmological simulations of galaxy formation

Abstract We present the first model that couples high-resolution simulations of the formation of local group galaxies with calculations of the galactic habitable zone (GHZ), a region of space which…

Could a nearby supernova explosion have caused a mass extinction?

  • J. EllisD. Schramm
  • Physics
    Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America
  • 1995
It is examined the possibility that a nearby supernova explosion could have caused one or more of the mass extinctions identified by paleontologists, and the possible rate of such events is discussed.

The Host Galaxies of Tidal Disruption Events

Recent studies of Tidal Disruption Events (TDEs) have revealed unexpected correlations between the TDE rate and the large-scale properties of the host galaxies. In this review, we present the host…

New Physical Insights about Tidal Disruption Events from a Comprehensive Observational Inventory at X-Ray Wavelengths

We perform a comprehensive study of the X-ray emission from 70 transient sources that have been classified as tidal disruption events (TDEs) in the literature. We explore the properties of these…

Habitable Evaporated Cores and the Occurrence of Panspermia near the Galactic Center

Black holes growing via the accretion of gas emit radiation that can photoevaporate the atmospheres of nearby planets. Here, we couple planetary structural evolution models of sub-Neptune-mass…
...