Broadband Detections of Candidate Tidal Disruption Events by GALEX, CFHTLS, and Chandra

Details Broadband Detections of Candidate Tidal Disruption Events by GALEX, CFHTLS, and Chandra Broadband Detections of Candidate Tidal Disruption Events by GALEX, CFHTLS, and Chandra

Mar 2008

adsabs.harvard.edu/cgi-bin/nph-data_query?bibcode=2008head...10.2617g&link_type=abstract

American Astronomical Society, HEAD meeting #10, #26.17

Astronomy and Astrophysics

Astronomy

Scientific paper

A dormant supermassive black hole lurking in the nucleus of a distant galaxy will be revealed when a star passes close enough to be torn apart by tidal forces, and the stellar debris falls back onto the black hole resulting in a luminous accretion flare. In a systematic search of 2.9 deg2 of the GALEX Deep Imaging Survey that overlapped with the CFHT Legacy Survey, we discovered two luminous UV/optical flares from the nuclei of apparently inactive galaxies at z=0.37 and z=0.33 with no signs of permanent AGN activity in the form of hard X-ray emission or optical emission lines. The first few months of the UV/optical light curves are well fitted with the canonical t-5/3 power-law decay predicted for emission from the fallback of debris from a tidally disrupted star. Chandra ACIS observations during the flares detected extremely soft X-ray sources with TBB=(2-5)x105 K, and blackbody fits to the UV/optical spectral energy distributions of the flares indicate peak flare luminosities of > 1044 ergs/s. The temperature, luminosity, and light curves of both flares are in excellent agreement with emission from a tidally disrupted main sequence star onto a central black hole of several x 107 Msun. The observed detection rate of our search is consistent with tidal disruption rates calculated from dynamical models, and we use these models to make predictions for the next generation of optical synoptic surveys.

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