Ultraviolet Detection of the Tidal Disruption of a Star by a Supermassive Black Hole

By S. Gezari, D. C. Martin, Bruno Milliard, S. Basa, J. Halpern, K. Forster, P. Friedman, P. Morrissey, S. Neff, David Schiminovich and 3 more. 2006

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A supermassive black hole in the nucleus of a galaxy will be revealed when a star passes close enough to be torn apart by tidal forces and a flare of radiation is emitted by the stream of stellar debris that plunges into the black hole. Since common active galactic nuclei have accreting black holes that can also produce flares, a convincing demonstration that a stellar tidal disruption has occurred generally begins with a "normal" galaxy that has no evidence of prior nuclear activity. Here we report a luminous UV flare from an elliptical galaxy at z = 0.37 in the Groth field of the GALEX Deep Imaging Survey that has no evidence of a Seyfert nucleus from optical spectroscopy and X-ray imaging obtained during the flare. Multiwavelength data collected at the time of the event, and for 2 years following, allow us to constrain, for the first time, the spectral energy distribution of a candidate tidal disruption flare from optical through X-rays. The luminosity and temperature of the radiation and the decay curve of the flare are in excellent agreement with theoretical predictions for the tidal disruption of a star, and provide the strongest empirical evidence for a stellar disruption event to date.

Subfields: Astronomy and Astrophysics, Instrumentation

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/a19ac0bee05bc9b1993366d7de3d786f6a36221b

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Citations in the corpus

ASASSN-15oi: a rapidly evolving, luminous tidal disruption event at 216 Mpc (2016, background): “…Leighly 1999; Komossa & Greiner 1999; Donley et al. 2002; Maksym, Ulmer & Eracleous 2010; Saxton et al. 2012), ultraviolet (e.g., Stern et al. 2004; Gezari et al. 2006, 2008, 2009), and optical (e.g., van Velzen et al. 2011; Gezari et al. 2012; Cenko et al. 2012a; Arcavi et al. 2014; Chornock et…”
PS1-10jh: THE DISRUPTION OF A MAIN-SEQUENCE STAR OF NEAR-SOLAR COMPOSITION (2013, background): “…this event provides significantly more information on the underlying mechanisms than the small number of poorly sampled UV/optical TDEs that only capture the decay phase and may have no spectroscopic data (Gezari et al. 2006, 2008; Cappelluti et al. 2009; van Velzen et al. 2011; Cenko et al. 2012).”
Radio transients from stellar tidal disruption by massive black holes (2011, background): “…to detect in the bright and dust-extincted central regions of galaxies, surveys atX-ray (e.g. Donley et al. 2002; Esquej et al. 2008), optical (van Velzen et al. 2010) and far UV wavelengths (Gezari et al. 2006, 2008, 2009) have now detected∼ 10 candidates (see Gezari 2009 for a recent review).”
A CONTINUUM OF H- TO He-RICH TIDAL DISRUPTION CANDIDATES WITH A PREFERENCE FOR E+A GALAXIES (2014, methodology): “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”
Optical Flares from the Tidal Disruption of Stars by Massive Black Holes (2009, background): “Several candidate tidal disruption events were discovered in the ROSAT All-Sky Survey (see Komossa 2002) and the XMM-Newton Slew Survey (Esquej et al. 2007); the GALEX Deep Imaging Survey has so far yielded three candidates (Gezari et al. 2006, 2008, 2009).”
The Mass Function of Active Black Holes in the Local Universe (2007, background): “Finally, future time-domain surveys may place limits on the frequency of flares from the tidal disruption of stars captured by BHs in dwarf galaxies (e.g., Rees 1988; Donley et al. 2002; Gezari et al. 2006; Milosavljević et al. 2006).”
Tidal Disruption Events (2013, methodology): “A systematic search for extragalactic UV transients from creating yearly coadds of the multiple exposures taken to build up the GALEX DIS images, and selecting only host galaxies with follow-up optical spectra that indicated an inactive galaxy host, yielded three candidates, two of which, D1-9 and D”
OPTICAL DISCOVERY OF PROBABLE STELLAR TIDAL DISRUPTION FLARES (2010, background): “A number of candidate TDEs have been identified in X-ray surveys (Bade et al. 1996; Komossa & Bade 1999; Donley et al. 2002; Esquej et al. 2008; Cappelluti et al. 2009; Maksym et al. 2010) —for a review see Komossa (2002)— and in the UV GALEX Deep Imaging Survey (Gezari et al. 2006, 2008, 2009b).”
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).”
Rates of stellar tidal disruption as probes of the supermassive black hole mass function (2014, background): “…with a diverse mixture of optical (van Velzen et al. 2011; Cenko et al. 2012a; Gezari et al. 2012; Arcavi et al. 2014; Chornock et al. 2014), UV (Gezari et al. 2006, 2008, 2009), X-ray (Bade et al. 1996; Komossa & Greiner 1999; Maksym et al. 2013), and gamma ray (Bloom et al. 2011; Levan et al.…”
A bright year for tidal disruptions (2015, background): “…1999, Komossa & Greiner 1999, Donley et al. 2002, Esquej et al. 2008, Maksym et al. 2010, Saxton et al. 2012), ultraviolet (e.g., Stern et al. 2004, Gezari et al. 2006, 2008, 2009), and optical (van Velzen et al. 2011, Gezari et al. 2012, Cenko et al. 2012a, Arcavi et al. 2014, Chornock et al.…”
ECCENTRICITY GROWTH AND ORBIT FLIP IN NEAR-COPLANAR HIERARCHICAL THREE-BODY SYSTEMS (2013, background): “Tidal disruption of stars by black holes may produce luminous electromagnetic transients that have been observed (e.g. Bade et al. 1996; Komossa & Greiner 1999; Gezari et al. 2003, 2006, 2008, 2009; van Velzen et al. 2011; Cenko et al. 2012; Gezari et al. 2012).”
Consequences of Strong Compression in Tidal Disruption Events (2012, background): “…candidates have been observed, with most detections made in X-ray (Bade, Komossa & Dahlem 1996; Komossa & Greiner 1999; Gezari et al. 2003) or UV (Gezari et al. 2006, 2008, 2009), but some in optical archival (van Velzen et al. 2011) and transient (Cenko et al. 2012a; Gezari et al. 2012)…”
GALAXY ZOO: THE FUNDAMENTALLY DIFFERENT CO-EVOLUTION OF SUPERMASSIVE BLACK HOLES AND THEIR EARLY- AND LATE-TYPE HOST GALAXIES (2010, background): “…evolved stars (e.g., Davies et al. 2007; Ho 2008), the infall of a minor dwarf galaxy or the tidal disruption of a star by the black hole (e.g., Gezari et al. 2006) As we have discussed, it is unlikely that the late-type AGN hosts are involved in the same transition from the blue cloud to the…”