Swift J1644+57: Discovery Of A Newly Active Massive Black Hole

Details Swift J1644+57: Discovery Of A Newly Active Massive Black Hole Swift J1644+57: Discovery Of A Newly Active Massive Black Hole

Sep 2011

adsabs.harvard.edu/cgi-bin/nph-data_query?bibcode=2011head...12.4410b&link_type=abstract

American Astronomical Society, HEAD meeting #12, #44.10

Astronomy and Astrophysics

Astronomy

Scientific paper

On March 28, 2011, the Swift Burst Alert Telescope triggered on an object that has no analog in over six years of Swift operations. Followup observations by the Swift X-ray Telescope have shown a new, bright X-ray source with highly variable flux (covering 3 orders of magnitude in flux over the first few days) that has been much more persistent than gamma-ray burst afterglows. Optical photometry shows a decaying NIR source coincident with the X-ray object. Ground-based spectroscopy found a redshift of 0.35, implying extremely high luminosity, with integrated isotropic X-ray energy output exceeding 10^53 ergs in the first two weeks after discovery. Deep serendipitous archival X-ray observations show no counterpart to fluxes orders of magnitude below the light curve peak values. There is strong evidence for a collimated (or beamed) jet. The observational properties of this object are unlike anything ever before observed. We interpret these unique properties as the result of emission from a relativistic jet produced in the aftermath of the tidal disruption of a star by a massive black hole in the center of the host galaxy. If so, we expect the source to decay slowly as the stellar remnants are accreted onto the central black hole.

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