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A likely decade-long sustained tidal disruption event

Nature Astronomy volume 1, Article number: 0033 (2017) Cite this article

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Abstract

Multiwavelength flares from tidal disruption and accretion of stars can be used to find and study otherwise dormant massive black holes in galactic nuclei1. Previous well-monitored candidate flares were short-lived, with most emission confined to within ∼1 year2–5. Here we report the discovery of a well-observed super-long (>11 years) luminous X-ray flare from the nuclear region of a dwarf starburst galaxy. After an apparently fast rise within ∼4 months a decade ago, the X-ray luminosity, though showing a weak trend of decay, has been persistently high at around the Eddington limit (when the radiation pressure balances the gravitational force). The X-ray spectra are soft — steeply declining towards higher energies — and can be described with Comptonized emission from an optically thick low-temperature corona, a super-Eddington accretion signature often observed in accreting stellar-mass black holes6. Dramatic spectral softening was also caught in one recent observation, implying either a temporary transition from the super-Eddington accretion state to the standard thermal state, or the presence of a transient highly blueshifted (∼0.36c) warm absorber. All these properties in concert suggest a tidal disruption event with an unusually long super-Eddington accretion phase that has never before been observed.

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Figure 1: The CFHT/MegaPrime r′-band image around the field of XJ1500+0154 indicates its galactic nuclear origin.
Figure 2: The long-term evolution of the X-ray luminosity and spectrum of XJ1500+0154.

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Acknowledgements

D.L. is supported by the National Aeronautics and Space Administration through Chandra Award Number GO5-16087X issued by the Chandra X-ray Observatory Center, which is operated by the Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory for and on behalf of the National Aeronautics Space Administration under contract NAS8-03060. We thank the Swift principal investigator N. Gehrels for approving our ToO request to make several observations of XJ1500+0154.

Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Space Science Center, University of New Hampshire, Durham, 03824, New Hampshire, USA

    Dacheng Lin

  2. Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, The Institute for Theory and Computation, 60 Garden Street, Cambridge, 02138, Massachusetts, USA

    James Guillochon

  3. QianNan Normal University for Nationalities, Longshan Street, Duyun City of Guizhou Province, China

    S. Komossa

  4. Department of Astronomy and Astrophysics, University of California, Santa Cruz, 95064, California, USA

    Enrico Ramirez-Ruiz

  5. Department of Physics and Astronomy, University of Alabama, Box 870324, Tuscaloosa, 35487, Alabama, USA

    Jimmy A. Irwin

  6. Department of Physics and Astronomy, Seoul National University, Seoul 08826, Korea

    Jimmy A. Irwin

  7. Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, 60 Garden St., Cambridge, 02138, Massachusetts, USA

    W. Peter Maksym

  8. Space Science Center, Morehead State University, 235 Martindale Drive, Morehead, 40351, Kentucky, USA

    Dirk Grupe

  9. CNRS, IRAP, 9 avenue du Colonel Roche, BP 44346, Toulouse Cedex 4, F-31028, France

    Olivier Godet, Natalie A. Webb & Didier Barret

  10. Université de Toulouse, UPS-OMP, IRAP, Toulouse, France

    Olivier Godet, Natalie A. Webb & Didier Barret

  11. Center for Cosmology and Particle Physics, New York University, 4 Washington Place, New York, 10003, New York, USA

    B. Ashley Zauderer

  12. AIM Paris-Saclay Service d'Astrophysique, CEA-Saclay, Gif sur Yvette, 91191, France

    Pierre-Alain Duc

  13. Gemini Observatory/AURA, Southern Operations Center, Casilla 603, La Serena, Chile

    Eleazar R. Carrasco

  14. Canadian Astronomy Data Centre, Herzberg Institute of Astrophysics, 5071 West Saanich Road, Victoria, V9E 2E7, British Columbia, Canada

    Stephen D. J. Gwyn

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  1. Dacheng Lin
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Contributions

D.L. wrote the main manuscript and led the data analysis. J.G. helped with the modelling of the long-term X-ray light curve and wrote the text on the modelling in the Supplementary Information. S.G. stacked the CFHT images. All authors discussed the results and commented on the manuscript.

Corresponding author

Correspondence to Dacheng Lin.

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The authors declare no competing financial interests.

Supplementary information

Supplementary Information

Supplementary Notes 1–13, Supplementary Tables 1–2, Supplementary Figures 1–8, Supplementary References. (PDF 646 kb)

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Lin, D., Guillochon, J., Komossa, S. et al. A likely decade-long sustained tidal disruption event. Nat Astron 1, 0033 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41550-016-0033

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