  When a star comes within a critical distance to a supermassive black hole
(SMBH), immense tidal forces disrupt the star, resulting in a stream of debris
that falls back onto the SMBH and powers a luminous flare. In this paper, we
perform hydrodynamical simulations of the disruption of a main-sequence star by
a SMBH to characterize the evolution of the debris stream after a tidal
disruption. We demonstrate that this debris stream is confined by self-gravity
in the two directions perpendicular to the original direction of the star's
travel, and as a consequence has a negligible surface area and makes almost no
contribution to either the continuum or line emission. We therefore propose
that any observed emission lines are not the result of photoionization in this
unbound debris, but are produced in the region above and below the forming
elliptical accretion disk, analogous to the broad-line region (BLR) in
steadily-accreting active galactic nuclei. As each line within a BLR is
observationally linked to a particular location in the accretion disk, we
suggest that the absence of a line indicates that the accretion disk does not
yet extend to the distance required to produce that line. This model can be
used to understand the spectral properties of the tidal disruption event (TDE)
PS1-10jh, for which He II lines are observed, but the Balmer series and He I
are not. Using a maximum likelihood analysis, we show that the disruption of a
main-sequence star of near-solar composition can reproduce this event.
