ASASSN-14ae: a tidal disruption event at 200 Mpc

By T. Holoien, J. Prieto, D. Bersier, C. Kochanek, Krzysztof Zbigniew Stanek, B. Shappee, D. Grupe, U. Basu, J. Beacom, J. Brimacombe and 5 more. 2014

203 citations recorded by the source corpus.

ASASSN-14ae is a candidate tidal disruption event (TDE) found at the centre of SDSS J110840.11+340552.2 (d ≃ 200 Mpc) by the All-Sky Automated Survey for Supernovae (ASAS-SN). We present ground-based and Swift follow-up photometric and spectroscopic observations of the source, finding that the transient had a peak luminosity of L ≃ 8 × 1043 erg s−1 and a total integrated energy of E ≃ 1.7 × 1050 erg radiated over the ∼5 months of observations presented. The blackbody temperature of the transient remains roughly constant at T ∼ 20 000 K while the luminosity declines by nearly 1.5 orders of magnitude during this time, a drop that is most consistent with an exponential, L ∝ e-t/t 0 with t0 ≃ 39 d. The source has broad Balmer lines in emission at all epochs as well as a broad He ii feature emerging in later epochs. We compare the colour and spectral evolution to both supernovae and normal AGN to show that ASASSN-14ae does not resemble either type of object and conclude that a TDE is the most likely explanation for our observations. At z = 0.0436, ASASSN-14ae is the lowest-redshift TDE candidate discovered at optical/UV wavelengths to date, and we estimate that ASAS-SN may discover 0.1–3 of these events every year in the future.

Subfields: Astronomy and Astrophysics, Nuclear and High Energy Physics

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/08a3dcb4f26bbc5badceb6a07e840df3b11228bd

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Citations in the corpus

New Physical Insights about Tidal Disruption Events from a Comprehensive Observational Inventory at X-Ray Wavelengths (2016, methodology): “Holoien et al. (2014) find no X-ray emission arising from the source.”
Revisiting Optical Tidal Disruption Events with iPTF16axa (2017, methodology): “…PTF09ge from PTF (Arcavi et al. 2014), PS1-10jh (Gezari et al. 2012), and PS1-11af (Chornock et al. 2014) from GALEX+Pan-STARRS1, ASASSN-14ae (Holoien et al. 2014), ASASSN-14li (Holoien et al. 2016b), and ASASSN-15oi (Holoien et al. 2016a) from ASASSN, and iPTF 16fnl (Blagorodnova et al.…”
The Final Season Reimagined: 30 Tidal Disruption Events from the ZTF-I Survey (2022, background): “…with wide-field optical surveys at the forefront of these discoveries, including iPTF (Blagorodnova et al. 2017, 2019; Hung et al. 2017), ASAS-SN (Holoien et al. 2014, 2016a, 2016b, 2019b; Wevers et al. 2019; Hinkle et al. 2021a), Pan-STARRS (Gezari et al. 2012; Chornock et al. 2014; 22 Neil…”
Weighing Black Holes Using Tidal Disruption Events (2018, unknown): “…et al. 2017; (6) Brown et al. 2018; (7) Hung et al. 2017; (8) Holoien et al. 2016b; (9) van Velzen et al. 2016; (10) Holoien et al. 2016a; (11) Holoien et al. 2014; (12) Wyrzykowski et al. 2017; (13) Gezari et al. 2008; (13) van Velzen et al. 2011. a Temperatures for these events are taken…”
Circularization of Tidally Disrupted Stars around Spinning Supermassive Black Holes (2015, background): “…for TDEs have also been observed at X-ray, ultraviolet, and optical wavebands (Komossa & Bade 1999; Gezari et al. 2012; Arcavi et al. 2014; Holoien et al. 2014; Vinkó et al. 2015), with inferred event rates of 10−5 per year per galaxy (Donley et al. 2002; van Velzen & Farrar 2014),…”
Six months of multiwavelength follow-up of the tidal disruption candidate asassn-14li and implied tde rates from asas-sn (2015, methodology): “…of the SMBH in PGC 043234, we use a bulge mass of MB ∼ 109.3 M based on the total mass from the FAST fit and Mendel et al. (2014) and the MB-MBH relation from McConnell & Ma (2013), giving MBH ∼ 106.7 M , a value very similar to that estimated for the host of ASASSN-14ae (Holoien et al. 2014a).”
Observational evidence for intermediate-mass black holes (2017, background): “…2015) have been associated with SMBHs (e.g., Komossa & Bade 1999; Halpern et al. 2004; Lin et al. 2011, 2015; van Velzen et al. 2011; Cenko et al. 2012; Gezari et al. 2012; Saxton et al. 2012, 2017; Chornock et al. 2014; Holoien et al. 2014; Vinkó et al. 2015; see Komossa 2015 for a review).”
ASASSN-15oi: a rapidly evolving, luminous tidal disruption event at 216 Mpc (2016, methodology): “In all cases, the magnitude of the color change is fairly minor compared to that of supernovae, which typically become redder much more rapidly (see Figure 7 of Holoien et al. (2014a) for a comparison).”
The All-Sky Automated Survey for Supernovae (ASAS-SN) Light Curve Server v1.0 (2017, background): “Rarer Galactic events are classical novae (e.g., Stanek et al. 2016), M and even L dwarf flares (e.g., Schmidt et al. 2014, 2016), and outbursts of young stellar objects (Holoien et al. 2014a, Herczeg et al. 2016).”
A bright year for tidal disruptions (2015, background): “H E ] 1 0 Ju n 20 15 2 Velzen et al. 2011, Gezari et al. 2012, Arcavi et al. 2014, Chornock et al. 2014, Holoien et al. 2014, Vinkó et al. 2015), well below the predicted values of Teff ≈ 3 × 105 − 106 K from equation (1) for M• ∼< 10 7 K and the range of accretion rates, Ṁ ∼> ṀEdd, thought to…”
The fast, luminous ultraviolet transient AT2018cow: extreme supernova, or disruption of a star by an intermediate-mass black hole? (2018, methodology): “The spectral features in AT2018cow are substantially weaker than in the examples of TDEs that we are aware of (bottom panel of Figure 11; comparison spectra are from Holoien et al. 2014, 2016), but the resemblance to a TDE is much stronger than to any supernova.”
Swift J1112.2−8238: a candidate relativistic tidal disruption flare (2015, background): “…follow-up precludes the building of an optical SED which would help distinguish between the thermal SEDs of previous TDFs, (e.g. ASASSN-14ae, Holoien et al. (2014); PS1-10jh, Gezari et al. (2012)), for which the peak absolute magnitudes are loosely consistent, and the differing, non-thermal…”