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Figure 1: A schematic illustration of the possible orbital evolutionary paths of a white dwarf that is tidally captured by an intermediate mass black hole. The star is initially scattered into a highly elongated trajectory that evolves due to impulsive energy and angular momentum exchanges between the star and orbit that occur every pericentre passage, the pericentre distance remaining very nearly fixed. As a result of these, the internal energy and angular momentum increase. However, this process is slowed as the star spins up and under favourable conditions gravitational radiation can become important so that it controls the orbital evolution and/or damps the excited pulsation modes. The latter case a) leading to cases a1) and a2) occurs where other non linear processes are ineffective at dissipating the pulsations. Case b) leading to cases b1) and b2) occurs when such processes are more effective. For both cases a) and b) the star may survive the orbital evolution if the tidal capture occurs at sufficiently large pericentre distance. |
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Figure 2:
Characteristic time scales in
years as functions of the dimensionless orbital energy ![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() |
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Figure 3:
Same as Fig. 1 but for ![]() ![]() |
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