Seventeen Tidal Disruption Events from the First Half of ZTF Survey Observations: Entering a New Era of Population Studies

By S. Velzen, S. Gezari, E. Hammerstein, Nathaniel Roth, S. Frederick, C. Ward, T. Hung, S. Cenko, R. Stein, D. Perley and 27 more. Astrophysical Journal, 2020

254 citations recorded by the source corpus.

While tidal disruption events (TDEs) have long been heralded as laboratories for the study of quiescent black holes, the small number of known TDEs and uncertainties in their emission mechanism have hindered progress toward this promise. Here we present 17 new TDEs that have been detected recently by the Zwicky Transient Facility along with Swift UV and X-ray follow-up observations. Our homogeneous analysis of the optical/UV light curves, including 22 previously known TDEs from the literature, reveals a clean separation of light-curve properties with spectroscopic class. The TDEs with Bowen fluorescence features in their optical spectra have smaller blackbody radii, lower optical luminosities, and higher disruption rates compared to the rest of the sample. The small subset of TDEs that show only helium emission lines in their spectra have the longest rise times, the highest luminosities, and the lowest rates. A high detection rate of Bowen lines in TDEs with small photometric radii could be explained by the high density that is required for this fluorescence mechanism. The stellar debris can provide a source for this dense material. Diffusion of photons through this debris may explain why the rise and fade timescale of the TDEs in our sample are not correlated. We also report, for the first time, the detection of soft X-ray flares from a TDE on ∼day timescales. Based on the fact that the X-ray flares peak at a luminosity similar to the optical/UV blackbody luminosity, we attribute them to brief glimpses through a reprocessing layer that otherwise obscures the inner accretion flow.

Subfields: Astronomy and Astrophysics, Instrumentation

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/7ed0135870170bae4890856c2b983cdc1e021115

How researchers see this paper

The researchers whose trusted networks rank it highest, strongest advocate first. Every researcher gets a different order.

In Astronomy and Astrophysics

1. A. Gal-yam
2. A. Filippenko
3. J. Sollerman
4. D. Perley
5. S. Cenko
6. T. Brink
7. S. Dhawan
8. E. Berger

In Instrumentation

1. A. Filippenko
2. T. Brink
3. A. Gal-yam
4. S. Gezari
5. S. Dhawan
6. S. Cenko
7. J. Sollerman
8. J. Neill

Citations in the corpus

• The Final Season Reimagined: 30 Tidal Disruption Events from the ZTF-I Survey (2022, methodology): “Sixteen of these TDEs were originally presented as part of a ZTF-I sample in van Velzen et al. (2021).”
• The Zwicky Transient Facility Bright Transient Survey. II. A Public Statistical Sample for Exploring Supernova Demographics (2020, methodology): “Parallel efforts within ZTF focusing on these populations are ongoing; these are described in other works (van Velzen et al. 2019, 2020; Ho et al. 2020a).”