A Remarkably Loud Quasi-Periodicity after a Star is Disrupted by a Massive Black Hole

The immense tidal forces of massive black holes can rip apart stars that come too close to them. As the resulting stellar debris spirals inwards, it heats up and emits x-rays when near the black hole. Here, we report the discovery of an exceptionally stable 131-second x-ray quasi-periodicity from a...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:arXiv.org 2018-10
Main Authors: Pasham, Dheeraj R, Remillard, Ronald A, Fragile, P Chris, Franchini, Alessia, Stone, Nicholas C, Lodato, Giuseppe, Homan, Jeroen, Chakrabarty, Deepto, Baganoff, Frederick K, Steiner, James F, Coughlin, Eric R, Pasham, Nishanth R
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Black holes
Disruption
Event horizon
Galaxies
Periodic variations
Spirals
Online Access:Get full text
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Summary:The immense tidal forces of massive black holes can rip apart stars that come too close to them. As the resulting stellar debris spirals inwards, it heats up and emits x-rays when near the black hole. Here, we report the discovery of an exceptionally stable 131-second x-ray quasi-periodicity from a black hole after it disrupted a star. Using a black hole mass indicated from host galaxy scaling relations implies that, (1) this periodicity originates from very close to the black hole's event horizon, and (2) the black hole is rapidly spinning. Our findings suggest that other disruption events with similar highly sensitive observations likely also exhibit quasi-periodicities that encode information about the fundamental properties of their black holes.
ISSN:2331-8422
DOI:10.48550/arxiv.1810.10713