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Luminous Thermal Flares from Quiescent Supermassive Black Holes | Suvi Gezari
; Tim Heckman
; S. Bradley Cenko
; Michael Eracleous
; Karl Forster
; Thiago S. Goncalves
; D. Chris Martin
; Patrick Morrissey
; Susan G. Neff
; Mark Seibert
; David Schiminovich
; Ted K. Wyder
; | Date: |
9 Apr 2009 | Abstract: | A dormant supermassive black hole lurking in the center of a galaxy will be
revealed when a star passes close enough to be torn apart by tidal forces, and
a flare of electromagnetic radiation is emitted when the bound fraction of the
stellar debris falls back onto the black hole and is accreted. Here we present
the third candidate tidal disruption event discovered in the GALEX Deep Imaging
Survey: a 1.6x10^{43} erg s^{-1} UV/optical flare from a star-forming galaxy at
z=0.1855. The UV/optical SED during the peak of the flare measured by GALEX and
Palomar LFC imaging can be modeled as a single temperature blackbody with
T_{bb}=1.7x10^{5} K and a bolometric luminosity of 3x10^{45} ergs s^{-1},
assuming an internal extinction with E(B-V)_{gas}=0.3. The Chandra upper limit
on the X-ray luminosity during the peak of the flare, L_{X}(2-10 keV)< 10^{41}
ergs s^{-1}, is two orders of magnitude fainter than expected from the ratios
of UV to X-ray flux density observed in active galaxies. We compare the light
curves and broadband properties of all 3 tidal disruption candidates discovered
by GALEX, and find that (1) the light curves are well fitted by the power-law
decline expected for the fallback of debris from a tidally disrupted solar-type
star, and (2) the UV/optical spectral energy distributions can be attributed to
thermal emission from an envelope of debris located at roughly ten times the
tidal disruption radius of a ~10^{7} M_sun central black hole. We use the
observed peak absolute optical magnitudes of the flares (-17.5 > M_{g} > -18.9)
to predict the detection capabilities of upcoming optical synoptic surveys.
(Abridged) | Source: | arXiv, 0904.1596 | Services: | Forum | Review | PDF | Favorites |
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