The fine line between total and partial tidal disruption events

Flares from tidal disruption events are unique tracers of quiescent black holes at the centre of galaxies. The appearance of these flares is very sensitive to whether the star is totally or partially disrupted, and in this paper we seek to identify the critical distance of the star from the black hole (r(d)) that enables us to distinguish between these two outcomes. We perform here mesh-free finite mass, traditional, and modern smoothed particle hydrodynamical simulations of star-black hole close encounters, with the aim of checking if the value of rd depends on the simulation technique. We find that the critical distance (or the so-called critical disruption parameter beta(d)) depends only weakly on the adopted simulation method, being beta(d) = 0.92 +/- 0.02 for a gamma = 5/3 polytrope and beta(d) = 2.01 +/- 0.01 for a gamma = 4/3 polytrope.