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

By K. Auchettl, J. Guillochon, E. Ramirez-Ruiz. 2016

212 citations recorded by the source corpus.

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 candidates, using nearly three decades of X-ray observations to quantify their properties and characteristics. We find that the emission from X-ray TDEs increase by two to three orders of magnitude, compared to pre-flare constraints. These emissions evolve significantly with time, and decay with power-law indices that are typically shallower than the canonical t−5/3 decay law, implying that X-ray TDEs are viscously delayed. These events exhibit enhanced (relative to galactic) column densities and are quite soft in nature, with no strong correlation between the amount of detected soft and hard emission. At their peak, jetted events have an X-ray to optical ratio ≫1, whereas non-jetted events have a ratio ∼1, which suggests that these events undergo reprocessing at different rates. X-ray TDEs have long T90 values, consistent with what would be expected from a viscously driven accretion disk formed by the disruption of a main-sequence star by a black hole with a mass <107 M⊙. The isotropic luminosities of X-ray TDEs are bimodal, such that jetted and non-jetted events are separated by a “reprocessing valley” that we suggest is naturally populated by optical/UV TDEs that most likely produce X-rays, but this emission is “veiled” from observations due to reprocessing. Our results suggest that non-jetted X-ray TDEs likely originate from partial disruptions and/or disruptions of low-mass stars.

Subfields: Astronomy and Astrophysics

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/0a7ae49cfea2a276ac3e577fb1a4aba3c63aea44

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Citations in the corpus

The Final Season Reimagined: 30 Tidal Disruption Events from the ZTF-I Survey (2022, background): “…emission are the absorption of the X-ray photons from the disk and subsequent reprocessing into optical/UV wavelengths (Guillochon et al. 2014; Auchettl et al. 2017), and the onset of accretion and therefore X-ray emission being delayed due to the time it takes for the tidal debris to…”
Nuclear star clusters (2009, background): “The observation of TDEs is a rapidly growing field with detections at optical, UV and X-ray wavelengths (see Auchettl et al. 2017, for a recent compilation of events).”
Weighing Black Holes Using Tidal Disruption Events (2018, methodology): “They resemble veiled TDEs, in which the accretion disk is likely obscured by an optically thick photosphere or wind (Auchettl et al. 2017).”
PS16dtm: A Tidal Disruption Event in a Narrow-line Seyfert 1 Galaxy (2017, background): “With the number of TDE candidates currently numbering in the dozens (Auchettl et al. 2016), the possibility of a tidal disruption having occurred in one or more nearby active galaxies seems likely.”