A Potential Second Shutoff from AT2018fyk: An Updated Orbital Ephemeris of the Surviving Star under the Repeating Partial Tidal Disruption Event Paradigm

Abstract

The tidal disruption event (TDE) AT2018fyk showed a rapid dimming event 500 days after discovery, followed by a rebrightening roughly 700 days later. It has been hypothesized that this behavior results from a repeating partial TDE (rpTDE), such that prompt dimmings/shutoffs are coincident with the return of the star to pericenter and rebrightenings generated by the renewed supply of tidally stripped debris. This model predicted that the emission should shut off again around August of 2023. We report AT2018fyk’s continued X-ray and UV monitoring, which shows an X-ray (UV) drop-in flux by a factor of 10 (5) over a span of two months, starting 2023 August 14. This sudden change can be interpreted as the second emission shutoff, which (1) strengthens the rpTDE scenario for AT2018fyk, (2) allows us to constrain the orbital period to a more precise value of 1306 ± 47 days, and (3) establishes that X-ray and UV/optical emission track the fallback rate onto this supermassive black hole—an often-made assumption that otherwise lacks observational verification—and therefore, the UV/optical lightcurve is powered predominantly by processes tied to X-rays. The second cutoff implies that another rebrightening should happen between 2025 May and August, and if the star survived the second encounter, a third shutoff is predicted to occur between 2027 January and July. Finally, low-level accretion from the less-bound debris tail (which is completely unbound/does not contribute to accretion in a nonrepeating TDE) can result in a faint X-ray plateau that could be detectable until the next rebrightening.

Keywords

• Astrophysical black holes
• Supermassive black holes
• Tidal disruption
• X-ray astronomy
• Ultraviolet astronomy
• Transient sources