A CONTINUUM OF H- TO He-RICH TIDAL DISRUPTION CANDIDATES WITH A PREFERENCE FOR E+A GALAXIES

By I. Arcavi, A. Gal-yam, M. Sullivan, Yen-Chen Pan, S. Cenko, A. Horesh, Eran Ofek, A. De Cia, Lin Yan, Chenwei Yang and 16 more. 2014

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We present the results of a Palomar Transient Factory (PTF) archival search for blue transients that lie in the magnitude range between “normal” core-collapse and superluminous supernovae (i.e., with −21 ⩽ MR (peak) ⩽ − 19). Of the six events found after excluding all interacting Type IIn and Ia-CSM supernovae, three (PTF09ge, 09axc, and 09djl) are coincident with the centers of their hosts, one (10iam) is offset from the center, and a precise offset cannot be determined for two (10nuj and 11glr). All the central events have similar rise times to the He-rich tidal disruption candidate PS1-10jh, and the event with the best-sampled light curve also has similar colors and power-law decay. Spectroscopically, PTF09ge is He-rich, while PTF09axc and 09djl display broad hydrogen features around peak magnitude. All three central events are in low star formation hosts, two of which are E+A galaxies. Our spectrum of the host of PS1-10jh displays similar properties. PTF10iam, the one offset event, is different photometrically and spectroscopically from the central events, and its host displays a higher star formation rate. Finding no obvious evidence for ongoing galactic nuclei activity or recent star formation, we conclude that the three central transients likely arise from the tidal disruption of a star by a supermassive black hole. We compare the spectra of these events to tidal disruption candidates from the literature and find that all of these objects can be unified on a continuous scale of spectral properties. The accumulated evidence of this expanded sample strongly supports a tidal disruption origin for this class of nuclear transients.

Subfields: Astronomy and Astrophysics, Nuclear and High Energy Physics

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/611248e3e26b3f0b228eb990c6f7a3f4a44228a7

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Citations in the corpus

Revisiting Optical Tidal Disruption Events with iPTF16axa (2017, background): “The spectral family of TDEs was first discussed in Arcavi et al. (2014).”
Stellar Dynamics and Stellar Phenomena Near a Massive Black Hole (2017, background): “Recent observations indicate that TDEs are over-represented in rare galaxies that exhibit signs of a recently-ended (0.1–1 Gyr old) intense star formation epoch (Arcavi et al. 2014), as evidenced by the strong presence of A-type stars22.”
A bright year for tidal disruptions (2015, background): “MCG-6-30-15 has M• = 2.9+1.8−1.6 × 106 M and a• > 0.98, Ark564 has M• ∼ 1.1 × 106 M and a• = 0.96+0.01−0.11, IRAS13224-3809 has M• ∼ 6.3 × 106 and a• > 0.987, NGC 4051 has M• = 1.91± 0.78× 106 M and a• > 0.99, and 1H0707-495 has M• ∼ 2.3 × 106 M and a• > 0.97 (Reynolds 2013, Table 1).”
Swift J1112.2−8238: a candidate relativistic tidal disruption flare (2015, background): “A number of TDF candidates have been found in the UV (e.g. Gezari et al. 2008, 2009, 2012), soft X-rays (e.g. Brandt, Pounds, & Fink 1995; Grupe et al. 1995; Bade, Komossa, & Dahlem 1996; Cappelluti et al. 2009) and the optical (e.g. van Velzen et al. 2011; Cenko et al. 2012; Arcavi et al. 2014).”
PS16dtm: A Tidal Disruption Event in a Narrow-line Seyfert 1 Galaxy (2017, background): “The most notable feature is the broad He II λ4686 line seen in the spectrum of PS1-10jh and other TDEs (Arcavi et al. 2014).”
Black Hole Mergers in Galactic Nuclei Induced by the Eccentric Kozai–Lidov Effect (2017, background): “Thus, due to their recent star formation and overdensity in the nuclei, these galaxies were linked to an enhancement of tidal disruption events (e.g., Arcavi et al. 2014; Stone & van Velzen 2016).”
Rates of stellar tidal disruption as probes of the supermassive black hole mass function (2014, methodology): “…TDE flares furthermore possess much higher optical luminosities than predicted by previous models for TDE emission (e.g., Gezari et al. 2012; Arcavi et al. 2014); some of the tension in rates could thus be alleviated if the detected events represent only the brightest tail of the luminosity…”
Modules for Experiments in Stellar Astrophysics ( ): Convective Boundaries, Element Diffusion, and Massive Star Explosions (2017, background): “…billion pixel digital camera (LSST Science Collaboration et al. 2017) to open new perspectives on transient objects such as tidal disruption events (Bade et al. 1996; Stern et al. 2004; Arcavi et al. 2014; Komossa 2015) and interacting close binary systems (Oluseyi et al. 2012; Korol et al. 2017).”
A Unified Model for Tidal Disruption Events (2018, background): “First, many newly discovered TDEs produced luminous optical/NUV flares with a temperature of ∼ 104K (e.g., Gezari et al. 2012; Arcavi et al. 2014).”
Weighing Black Holes Using Tidal Disruption Events (2018, background): “…include a list of the events we fit: PS1-10jh (Gezari et al. 2012, 2015), PS1-11af (Chornock et al. 2014), PTF09djl (Arcavi et al. 2014), PTF09ge (Arcavi et al. 2014), iPTF16fnl (Blagorodnova et al. 2017; Brown et al. 2018), iPTF16axa (Hung et al. 2017), ASASSN-14li (Holoien et al. 2016b; Brown…”
ASASSN-14ae: a tidal disruption event at 200 Mpc (2014, background): “With both strong He and H emission lines, ASASSN-14ae appears to fall in the middle of the He-rich-to-H-rich continuum proposed by Arcavi et al. (2014).”
New Physical Insights about Tidal Disruption Events from a Comprehensive Observational Inventory at X-Ray Wavelengths (2016, methodology): “The light curve of PTF-10iam rises significantly faster to peak emission compared to the other TDE candidates suggested by Arcavi et al. (2014).”
Circularization of Tidally Disrupted Stars around Spinning Supermassive Black Holes (2015, background): “Candidates 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),…”
ASASSN-15oi: a rapidly evolving, luminous tidal disruption event at 216 Mpc (2016, methodology): “Figure 7 shows a comparison between spectra taken at or before maximum for ASASSN-15oi (Prentice et al. 2015), the He-rich TDE PTF09ge (Arcavi et al. 2014), the Type Ib supernova SN 2004gq (Modjaz et al. 2014), and the broad-line Type Ic supernova SN 2002ap (Gal-Yam, Ofek & Shemmer 2002).”
Six months of multiwavelength follow-up of the tidal disruption candidate asassn-14li and implied tde rates from asas-sn (2015, methodology): “In recent years, however, a number of candidates have been found by high-cadence optical surveys, including the All-Sky Automated Survey for Supernovae (ASASSN-14ae, Holoien et al. 2014a), the Palomar Transient Factory (PTF10iya, Cenko et al. 2012a; PTF09ge, PTF09axc, and PTF09djl, Arcavi et al. 201”