Abstract
The flare of radiation from the tidal disruption and accretion of a star can be used as a marker for supermassive black holes that otherwise lie dormant and undetected in the centres of distant galaxies1. Previous candidate flares2,3,4,5,6 have had declining light curves in good agreement with expectations, but with poor constraints on the time of disruption and the type of star disrupted, because the rising emission was not observed. Recently, two ‘relativistic’ candidate tidal disruption events were discovered, each of whose extreme X-ray luminosity and synchrotron radio emission were interpreted as the onset of emission from a relativistic jet7,8,9,10. Here we report a luminous ultraviolet–optical flare from the nuclear region of an inactive galaxy at a redshift of 0.1696. The observed continuum is cooler than expected for a simple accreting debris disk, but the well-sampled rise and decay of the light curve follow the predicted mass accretion rate and can be modelled to determine the time of disruption to an accuracy of two days. The black hole has a mass of about two million solar masses, modulo a factor dependent on the mass and radius of the star disrupted. On the basis of the spectroscopic signature of ionized helium from the unbound debris, we determine that the disrupted star was a helium-rich stellar core.
This is a preview of subscription content, access via your institution
Access options
Subscribe to this journal
Receive 51 print issues and online access
$199.00 per year
only $3.90 per issue
Buy this article
- Purchase on Springer Link
- Instant access to full article PDF
Prices may be subject to local taxes which are calculated during checkout
Similar content being viewed by others
References
Rees, M. J. Tidal disruption of stars by black holes of 10 to the 6th-10 to the 8th solar masses in nearby galaxies. Nature 333, 523–528 (1988)
Komossa, S. & Bade, N. The giant X-ray outbursts in NGC 5905 and IC 3599: follow-up observations and outburst scenarios. Astron. Astrophys. 343, 775–787 (1999)
Komossa, S. et al. 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. Astrophys. J. 603, L17–L20 (2004)
Esquej, P. et al. Evolution of tidal disruption candidates discovered by XMM-Newton. Astron. Astrophys. 489, 543–554 (2008)
Gezari, S. et al. Luminous thermal flares from quiescent supermassive black holes. Astrophys. J. 698, 1367–1379 (2009)
van Velzen, S. et al. Optical discovery of probable stellar tidal disruption flares. Astrophys. J. 741, 73–96 (2011)
Bloom, J. S. et al. A possible relativistic jetted outburst from a massive black hole fed by a tidally disrupted star. Science 333, 203–206 (2011)
Burrows, D. N. et al. Relativistic jet activity from the tidal disruption of a star by a massive black hole. Nature 476, 421–424 (2011)
Zauderer, B. A. et al. Birth of a relativistic outflow in the unusual γ-ray transient Swift J164449.3+573451. Nature 476, 425–428 (2011)
Cenko, S. B. et al. Swift J2058.4+0516: discovery of a possible second relativistic tidal disruption flare. Preprint at 〈http://arxiv.org/abs/1107.5307〉 (2011)
Phinney, E. S. in The Center of the Galaxy (ed. Morris, M. ) 543–553 (IAU Symp. 136, Kluwer, 1989)
Evans, C. R. & Kochanek, C. S. The tidal disruption of a star by a massive black hole. Astrophys. J. 346, L13–L16 (1989)
Ulmer, A. Flares from the tidal disruption of stars by massive black holes. Astrophys. J. 514, 180–187 (1999)
Kaiser, N. et al. The Pan-STARRS wide-field optical/NIR imaging survey. Proc. SPIE 7733, 77330E (2010)
Martin, D. C. et al. The Galaxy Evolution Explorer: a space ultraviolet survey mission. Astrophys. J. 619, L1–L6 (2005)
Aihara, H. et al. The eighth data release of the Sloan Digital Sky Survey: first data from SDSS-III. Astrophys. J. Suppl. Ser. 193, 29–45 (2011)
Lawrence, A. et al. The UKIRT Infrared Deep Sky Survey (UKIDSS). Mon. Not. R. Astron. Soc. 379, 1599–1617 (2007)
Blanton, M. R. & Roweis, S. K-corrections and filter transformations in the ultraviolet, optical, and near-infrared. Astron. J. 133, 734–754 (2007)
Häring, N. & Rix, H.-W. On the black hole mass-bulge mass relation. Astrophys. J. 604, L89–L92 (2004)
Lodato, G., King, A. R. & Pringle, J. E. Stellar disruption by a supermassive black hole: is the light curve really proportional to t−5/3? Mon. Not. R. Astron. Soc. 392, 332–340 (2009)
Strubbe, L. E. & Quataert, E. Optical flares from the tidal disruption of stars by massive black holes. Mon. Not. R. Astron. Soc. 400, 2070–2084 (2009)
Lawrence, A. The UV peak in active galactic nuclei: a false continuum from blurred reflection? Preprint 〈http://arxiv.org/abs/1110.0854〉 (2011)
Loeb, A. & Ulmer, A. Optical appearance of the debris of a star disrupted by a massive black hole. Astrophys. J. 489, 573–578 (1997)
Davies, M. B. & King, A. The stars of the galactic center. Astrophys. J. 624, L25–L27 (2005)
Kobayashi, S., Laguna, P., Phinney, E. S. & Mészáros, P. Gravitational waves and X-ray signals from stellar disruption by a massive black hole. Astrophys. J. 615, 855–865 (2004)
Maxted, P. F. L. et al. Discovery of a stripped red giant core in a bright eclipsing binary system. Mon. Not. R. Astron. Soc. 418, 1156–1164 (2011)
Ayal, S., Livio, M. & Piran, T. Tidal disruption of a solar-type star by a supermassive black hole. Astrophys. J. 545, 772–780 (2000)
Steffen, A. T. et al. The X-ray-to-optical properties of optically selected active galaxies over wide luminosity and redshift ranges. Astron. J. 131, 2826–2842 (2006)
Steele, I. A. et al. The Liverpool Telescope: performance and first results. Proc. SPIE 5389, 679 (2004)
Acknowledgements
We thank H. Tananbaum for approving our Chandra Director’s Discretionary Time request. We are grateful to G. Lodato for providing the tidal disruption event models in tabular form, and to S. Moran for running software to calculate the host-galaxy K-corrections. We thank R. E. Williams for discussions on the line emission in the spectra. S.G. was supported by NASA through a Hubble Fellowship grant awarded by the Space Telescope Science Institute, which is operated by AURA Inc. for NASA. Partial support for this work was provided by the National Science Foundation. The PS1 survey has been made possible through contributions of the Institute for Astronomy, the University of Hawaii, the Pan-STARRS Project Office, the Max-Planck Society and its participating institutes, The Johns Hopkins University, Durham University, the University of Edinburgh, Queen’s University Belfast, the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, the Las Cumbres Observatory Global Telescope Network Inc. and the National Central University of Taiwan, and by NASA under a grant issued through the Planetary Science Division of the NASA Science Mission Directorate. We acknowledge NASA’s support for construction, operation, and science analysis of the GALEX mission, which was developed in cooperation with Centre National d’Etudes Spatiales of France and the Korean Ministry of Science and Technology. Some of the observations reported here were obtained at the MMT Observatory, which is a joint facility of the Smithsonian Institution and the University of Arizona, and at the Liverpool Telescope, which is operated with financial support from the UK Science and Technology Facilities Council. The computations in this paper were run on the Odyssey cluster supported by the FAS Science Division Research Computing Group at Harvard University. R.J.F. is a Clay Fellow.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Contributions
S.G. designed the observations and the transient detection pipeline for the GALEX TDS, and measured the ultraviolet photometry of PS1-10jh. K.F. and J.D.N coordinated, and D.C.M. facilitated, the GALEX TDS observations. A.R. designed the PhotPipe transient detection pipeline hosted by Harvard/CfA for the PS1 Medium Deep Survey (MDS), and measured the optical photometry of PS1-10jh. R.C. designed, implemented and analysed the MMT optical spectroscopy observations, and contributed to the operation of PhotPipe and the visual inspection of transient alerts. E.B. proposed and facilitated the MMT observations. M.E.H., G.N., D.S. and R.J.F. contributed to the operation of PhotPipe and the visual inspection of transient alerts. P.J.C., R.J.F., G.H.M., L.C. and A.S. contributed to the MMT observations. S.J.S. designed, and K.S. operated, the transient pipeline for PS1 MDS hosted by Queen’s University Belfast. C.W.S., J.L.T. and W.M.W.-V. facilitated the transient pipelines for PS1 MDS. W.S.B., K.C.C., T.G., J.N.H., N.K., R.-P.K., E.A.M., J.S.M., P.A.P., C.W.S. and J.L.T. helped build the PS1 system. S.G. requested the Director’s Discretionary Time Chandra X-ray observation and analysed the data. A.L. obtained the Liverpool Telescope optical imaging observations and analysed the data, and stimulated discussions on the nature of the SED of PS1-10jh. S.G. analysed and modelled the multicolour light curve and the SED of PS1-10jh. T.H. and C.N. stimulated discussions on the nature of the disrupted star. The paper was organized and written by S.G., and all authors provided feedback on the manuscript.
Corresponding author
Ethics declarations
Competing interests
The authors declare no competing financial interests.
Supplementary information
Supplementary Information
This file contains Supplementary Text and Data 1-7, Supplementary Figures 1-5, Supplementary Tables 1-3 and additional references. (PDF 1280 kb)
Rights and permissions
About this article
Cite this article
Gezari, S., Chornock, R., Rest, A. et al. An ultraviolet–optical flare from the tidal disruption of a helium-rich stellar core. Nature 485, 217–220 (2012). https://doi.org/10.1038/nature10990
Received:
Accepted:
Published:
Issue Date:
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/nature10990
This article is cited by
-
Stream–disk shocks as the origins of peak light in tidal disruption events
Nature (2024)
-
Science with a Small Two-Band UV-Photometry Mission III: Active Galactic Nuclei and Nuclear Transients
Space Science Reviews (2024)
-
Correction to: X-Ray Properties of TDEs
Space Science Reviews (2021)
-
The Physics of Accretion Discs, Winds and Jets in Tidal Disruption Events
Space Science Reviews (2021)
-
Distinguishing Tidal Disruption Events from Impostors
Space Science Reviews (2021)
Comments
By submitting a comment you agree to abide by our Terms and Community Guidelines. If you find something abusive or that does not comply with our terms or guidelines please flag it as inappropriate.