The Astrophysical Journal (Jan 2022)
The Final Season Reimagined: 30 Tidal Disruption Events from the ZTF-I Survey
- Erica Hammerstein,
- Sjoert van Velzen,
- Suvi Gezari,
- S. Bradley Cenko,
- Yuhan Yao,
- Charlotte Ward,
- Sara Frederick,
- Natalia Villanueva,
- Jean J. Somalwar,
- Matthew J. Graham,
- Shrinivas R. Kulkarni,
- Daniel Stern,
- Igor Andreoni,
- Eric C. Bellm,
- Richard Dekany,
- Suhail Dhawan,
- Andrew J. Drake,
- Christoffer Fremling,
- Pradip Gatkine,
- Steven L. Groom,
- Anna Y. Q. Ho,
- Mansi M. Kasliwal,
- Viraj Karambelkar,
- Erik C. Kool,
- Frank J. Masci,
- Michael S. Medford,
- Daniel A. Perley,
- Josiah Purdum,
- Jan van Roestel,
- Yashvi Sharma,
- Jesper Sollerman,
- Kirsty Taggart,
- Lin Yan
Affiliations
- Erica Hammerstein
- ORCiD
- Department of Astronomy, University of Maryland , College Park, MD 20742, USA ; [email protected]; Astrophysics Science Division , NASA Goddard Space Flight Center, 8800 Greenbelt Road, Greenbelt, MD 20771, USA; Center for Research and Exploration in Space Science and Technology , NASA/GSFC, Greenbelt, MD 20771, USA
- Sjoert van Velzen
- ORCiD
- Leiden Observatory, Leiden University , P.O. Box 9513, 2300 RA Leiden, The Netherlands
- Suvi Gezari
- ORCiD
- Space Telescope Science Institute , 3700 San Martin Drive, Baltimore, MD 21218, USA
- S. Bradley Cenko
- ORCiD
- Astrophysics Science Division , NASA Goddard Space Flight Center, 8800 Greenbelt Road, Greenbelt, MD 20771, USA; Joint Space-Science Institute, University of Maryland , College Park, MD 20742, USA
- Yuhan Yao
- ORCiD
- Division of Physics, Mathematics, and Astronomy, California Institute of Technology , Pasadena, CA 91125, USA
- Charlotte Ward
- ORCiD
- Department of Astronomy, University of Maryland , College Park, MD 20742, USA ; [email protected]; Department of Astrophysical Sciences, Princeton University , Princeton, NJ 08544, USA
- Sara Frederick
- ORCiD
- Department of Physics and Astronomy, Vanderbilt University , VU Station 1807, Nashville, TN 37235, USA
- Natalia Villanueva
- ORCiD
- Department of Astronomy, Harvard University , Cambridge, MA 02138, USA
- Jean J. Somalwar
- ORCiD
- Division of Physics, Mathematics, and Astronomy, California Institute of Technology , Pasadena, CA 91125, USA
- Matthew J. Graham
- ORCiD
- Division of Physics, Mathematics, and Astronomy, California Institute of Technology , Pasadena, CA 91125, USA
- Shrinivas R. Kulkarni
- ORCiD
- Division of Physics, Mathematics, and Astronomy, California Institute of Technology , Pasadena, CA 91125, USA
- Daniel Stern
- ORCiD
- Jet Propulsion Laboratory, California Institute of Technology , 4800 Oak Grove Drive, Pasadena, CA 91109, USA
- Igor Andreoni
- ORCiD
- Department of Astronomy, University of Maryland , College Park, MD 20742, USA ; [email protected]; Astrophysics Science Division , NASA Goddard Space Flight Center, 8800 Greenbelt Road, Greenbelt, MD 20771, USA; Joint Space-Science Institute, University of Maryland , College Park, MD 20742, USA
- Eric C. Bellm
- ORCiD
- DIRAC Institute, Department of Astronomy, University of Washington , 3910 15th Avenue NE, Seattle, WA 98195, USA
- Richard Dekany
- ORCiD
- Caltech Optical Observatories, California Institute of Technology , Pasadena, CA 91125, USA
- Suhail Dhawan
- ORCiD
- Institute of Astronomy and Kavli Institute for Cosmology, University of Cambridge , Madingley Road, Cambridge CB3 0HA, UK
- Andrew J. Drake
- ORCiD
- Division of Physics, Mathematics, and Astronomy, California Institute of Technology , Pasadena, CA 91125, USA
- Christoffer Fremling
- ORCiD
- Division of Physics, Mathematics, and Astronomy, California Institute of Technology , Pasadena, CA 91125, USA
- Pradip Gatkine
- ORCiD
- Division of Physics, Mathematics, and Astronomy, California Institute of Technology , Pasadena, CA 91125, USA
- Steven L. Groom
- ORCiD
- IPAC, California Institute of Technology , 1200 E. California Boulevard, Pasadena, CA 91125, USA
- Anna Y. Q. Ho
- ORCiD
- Department of Astronomy, Cornell University , Ithaca, NY 14853, USA
- Mansi M. Kasliwal
- ORCiD
- Division of Physics, Mathematics, and Astronomy, California Institute of Technology , Pasadena, CA 91125, USA
- Viraj Karambelkar
- ORCiD
- Division of Physics, Mathematics, and Astronomy, California Institute of Technology , Pasadena, CA 91125, USA
- Erik C. Kool
- ORCiD
- The Oskar Klein Centre, Department of Astronomy, Stockholm University , AlbaNova, SE-10691, Stockholm, Sweden
- Frank J. Masci
- ORCiD
- IPAC, California Institute of Technology , 1200 E. California Boulevard, Pasadena, CA 91125, USA
- Michael S. Medford
- ORCiD
- University of California , Berkeley, Department of Astronomy, Berkeley, CA 94720, USA; Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory , 1 Cyclotron Road, Berkeley, CA 94720, USA
- Daniel A. Perley
- ORCiD
- Astrophysics Research Institute, Liverpool John Moores University , IC2, Liverpool Science Park, 146 Brownlow Hill, Liverpool L3 5RF, UK
- Josiah Purdum
- ORCiD
- Caltech Optical Observatories, California Institute of Technology , Pasadena, CA 91125, USA
- Jan van Roestel
- ORCiD
- Division of Physics, Mathematics, and Astronomy, California Institute of Technology , Pasadena, CA 91125, USA
- Yashvi Sharma
- ORCiD
- Division of Physics, Mathematics, and Astronomy, California Institute of Technology , Pasadena, CA 91125, USA
- Jesper Sollerman
- ORCiD
- The Oskar Klein Centre, Department of Astronomy, Stockholm University , AlbaNova, SE-10691, Stockholm, Sweden
- Kirsty Taggart
- ORCiD
- Department of Astronomy and Astrophysics, University of California , Santa Cruz, CA 95064, USA
- Lin Yan
- ORCiD
- Caltech Optical Observatories, California Institute of Technology , Pasadena, CA 91125, USA
- DOI
- https://doi.org/10.3847/1538-4357/aca283
- Journal volume & issue
-
Vol. 942,
no. 1
p. 9
Abstract
Tidal disruption events (TDEs) offer a unique way to study dormant black holes. While the number of observed TDEs has grown thanks to the emergence of wide-field surveys in the past few decades, questions regarding the nature of the observed optical, UV, and X-ray emission remain. We present a uniformly selected sample of 30 spectroscopically classified TDEs from the Zwicky Transient Facility Phase I survey operations with follow-up Swift UV and X-ray observations. Through our investigation into correlations between light-curve properties, we recover a shallow positive correlation between the peak bolometric luminosity and decay timescales. We introduce a new spectroscopic class of TDE, TDE-featureless, which are characterized by featureless optical spectra. The new TDE-featureless class shows larger peak bolometric luminosities, peak blackbody temperatures, and peak blackbody radii. We examine the differences between the X-ray bright and X-ray faint populations of TDEs in this sample, finding that X-ray bright TDEs show higher peak blackbody luminosities than the X-ray faint subsample. This sample of optically selected TDEs is the largest sample of TDEs from a single survey yet, and the systematic discovery, classification, and follow-up of this sample allows for robust characterization of TDE properties, an important stepping stone looking forward toward the Rubin era.
Keywords
- Astrophysical black holes
- Tidal disruption
- Galaxy nuclei
- High energy astrophysics
- Supermassive black holes
