A Tidal Disruption Event in a Nearby Galaxy Hosting an Intermediate Mass Black Hole
| Autor: | Donato, Davide, Cenko, Stephen Bradley, Covino, Stefano, Troja, Eleonora, Pursimo, Tapio, Cheung, Chi C., Fox, Ori D., Kutyrev, Alexander S., Campana, Sergio, Fugazza, Dino, Landt, Hermine, Butler, Nathaniel R. |
|---|---|
| Rok vydání: | 2013 |
| Předmět: | |
| Druh dokumentu: | Working Paper |
| DOI: | 10.1088/0004-637X/781/2/59 |
| Popis: | We report the serendipitous discovery of a bright point source flare in the Abell cluster 1795 with archival EUVE and Chandra observations. Assuming the EUVE emission is associated with the Chandra source, the X-ray 0.5-7 keV flux declined by a factor of ~2300 over a time span of 6 years, following a power-law decay with index ~2.44+-0.40. The Chandra data alone vary by a factor of ~20. The spectrum is well fit by a blackbody with a constant temperature of kT~0.09 keV (~10^6 K). The flare is spatially coincident with the nuclear region of a faint, inactive galaxy with a photometric redshift consistent at the one sigma level with the cluster (z=0.062476). We argue that these properties are indicative of a tidal disruption of a star by a black hole with log(M_BH/M_sun)~5.5+-0.5. If so, such a discovery indicates that tidal disruption flares may be used to probe black holes in the intermediate mass range, which are very difficult to study by other means. Comment: 51 pages (single column), 4 figures; Accepted for publication in ApJ |
| Databáze: | arXiv |
| Externí odkaz: |
|