A Huge Drop in the X-Ray Luminosity of the Nonactive Galaxy RX J1242.6–1119A, and the First Postflare Spectrum: Testing the Tidal Disruption Scenario

By S. Komossa, J. Halpern, N. Schartel, G. Hasinger, M. Santos-Lleo, P. Predehl. 2004

135 citations recorded by the source corpus.

In recent years, indirect evidence has emerged suggesting that many nearby nonactive galaxies harbor quiescent supermassive black holes. Knowledge of the frequency of occurrence of black holes, of their masses and spins, is of broad relevance for studying black hole growth and galaxy and active galactic nuclei formation and evolution. It has been suggested that an unavoidable consequence of the existence of supermassive black holes, and the best diagnostic of their presence in nonactive galaxies, would be occasional tidal disruption of stars captured by the black holes. These events manifest themselves in the form of luminous flares powered by accretion of debris from the disrupted star into the black hole. Candidate events among optically nonactive galaxies emerged in the past few years. For the first time, we have looked with high spatial and spectral resolution at one of these most extreme variability events ever recorded among galaxies. Here we report measuring a factor of ~200 drop in luminosity of the X-ray source RX J1242-1119 with the X-ray observatories Chandra and XMM-Newton, and perform tests of the favored outburst scenario, tidal disruption of a star by a supermassive black hole. We show that the detected "low-state" emission has properties such that it must still be related to the flare. The power-law shaped postflare X-ray spectrum indicates a "hardening" compared to outburst. The inferred black hole mass, the amount of liberated energy, and the duration of the event favor an accretion event of the form expected from the (partial or complete) tidal disruption of a star.

Subfields: Astronomy and Astrophysics, Nuclear and High Energy Physics

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/6779098f4423739d95f6dccf385feee42860c6fc

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In Astronomy and Astrophysics

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Citations in the corpus

• Finite, Intense Accretion Bursts from Tidal Disruption of Stars on Bound Orbits (2012, background): “All-sky surveys in the X-ray and UV have so far observed 13 candidate tidal disruption flares (Komossa & Bade 1999; Grupe et al. 1999; Greiner et al. 2000; Komossa et al. 2004; Halpern et al. 2004; Dogiel et al. 2009; Maksym et al. 2010; Bloom et al. 2011; Burrows et al. 2011).”
• A CONTINUUM OF H- TO He-RICH TIDAL DISRUPTION CANDIDATES WITH A PREFERENCE FOR E+A GALAXIES (2014, background): “A few TDE candidates were found in Xray data from ROSAT (Komossa & Bade 1999; Donley et al. 2002; Halpern et al. 2004), Chandra (Komossa et al. 2004) and XMM-Newton (Esquej et al. 2007), in γ-ray and X-ray data from Swift (Bloom et al. 2011; Burrows et al. 2011; Levan et al. 2011; Zauderer et al. 20”
• Disc formation from tidal disruptions of stars on eccentric orbits by Schwarzschild black holes (2015, background): “A handful E-mail: bonnerot@strw.leidenuniv.nl of candidate TDEs have been detected so far in these bands (e.g. Komossa et al. 2004; Esquej et al. 2008; Gezari et al. 2009; van Velzen et al. 2011; Zauderer et al. 2011).”
• THE ULTRAVIOLET-BRIGHT, SLOWLY DECLINING TRANSIENT PS1-11af AS A PARTIAL TIDAL DISRUPTION EVENT (2013, background): “Most of the TDE candidates reported in the literature are large amplitude soft X-ray flares from galaxy nuclei (e.g., Bade et al. 1996; Komossa & Bade 1999; Li et al. 2002; Komossa et al. 2004; Esquej et al. 2008; Maksym et al. 2013).”
• HYDRODYNAMICAL SIMULATIONS TO DETERMINE THE FEEDING RATE OF BLACK HOLES BY THE TIDAL DISRUPTION OF STARS: THE IMPORTANCE OF THE IMPACT PARAMETER AND STELLAR STRUCTURE (2012, background): “…which the peak of the accretion rate is clearly observed (Gezari et al. 2012), but both n(t) and n∞ are measurable for flares that are observed long after peak (Komossa & Greiner 1999; Komossa et al. 2004; Gezari et al. 2006, 2008; Cappelluti et al. 2009; van Velzen et al. 2011; Cenko et al. 2012).”
• The Afterglow of Massive Black Hole Coalescence (2004, background): “A possibly confusing source of X-ray flares are tidal disruptions of mainsequence stars (Rees 1990; Cannizzo, Lee, & Goodman 1990; Komossa et al. 2004).”
• The THESEUS space mission concept: science case, design and expected performances (2017, background): “Such events are expected to be visible in UV and soft X-rays (see, e.g., Komossa et al., 2004; Gezari et al., 2012).”
• New Physical Insights about Tidal Disruption Events from a Comprehensive Observational Inventory at X-Ray Wavelengths (2016, methodology): “…determined using follow up observations of these sources using current X-ray satellites such as Chandra (e.g., Halpern et al. 2004; Vaughan et al. 2004; Komossa et al. 2004) and XMM-Newton (e.g., Komossa et al. 2004); are coincident with the center of the host Galaxy (within the error circle of…”