The Final Season Reimagined: 30 Tidal Disruption Events from the ZTF-I Survey

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 unifo...

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Published in:arXiv.org 2022-11
Main Authors: Hammerstein, Erica, Sjoert van Velzen, Gezari, Suvi, S Bradley Cenko, Yao, Yuhan, Ward, Charlotte, Frederick, Sara, Villanueva, Natalia, Somalwar, Jean J, Graham, Matthew J, Kulkarni, Shrinivas R, Stern, Daniel, Andreoni, Igor, Bellm, Eric C, Dekany, Richard, Dhawan, Suhail, Drake, Andrew J, Fremling, Christoffer, Gatkine, Pradip, Groom, Steven L, Ho, Anna Y Q, Kasliwal, Mansi M, Karambelkar, Viraj, Kool, Erik C, Masci, Frank J, Medford, Michael S, Perley, Daniel A, Purdum, Josiah, Jan van Roestel, Sharma, Yashvi, Sollerman, Jesper, Taggart, Kirsty, Lin, Yan
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Blackbody
Bolometers
Classification
Decay
Disruption
Galaxies
Light curve
Luminosity
X-ray astronomy
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Summary: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 \textit{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 sub-sample. 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.
ISSN:2331-8422
DOI:10.48550/arxiv.2203.01461