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

Hammerstein, E ORCID: 0000-0002-5698-8703, van Velzen, S ORCID: 0000-0002-3859-8074, Gezari, S ORCID: 0000-0003-3703-5154, Cenko, SB ORCID: 0000-0003-1673-970X, Yao, Y ORCID: 0000-0001-6747-8509, Ward, C ORCID: 0000-0002-4557-6682, Frederick, S ORCID: 0000-0001-9676-730X, Villanueva, N ORCID: 0000-0001-6917-4656, Somalwar, JJ ORCID: 0000-0001-8426-5732, Graham, MJ ORCID: 0000-0002-3168-0139, Kulkarni, SR ORCID: 0000-0001-5390-8563, Stern, D ORCID: 0000-0003-2686-9241, Andreoni, I ORCID: 0000-0002-8977-1498, Bellm, EC ORCID: 0000-0001-8018-5348, Dekany, R ORCID: 0000-0002-5884-7867, Dhawan, S ORCID: 0000-0002-2376-6979, Drake, AJ ORCID: 0000-0003-0228-6594, Fremling, C ORCID: 0000-0002-4223-103X, Gatkine, P ORCID: 0000-0002-1955-2230, Groom, SL ORCID: 0000-0001-5668-3507 et al (2022) The Final Season Reimagined: 30 Tidal Disruption Events from the ZTF-I Survey. Astrophysical Journal, 942 (1). ISSN 1538-4357

Preview

Text Hammerstein_2023_ApJ_942_9.pdf - Published Version Available under License Creative Commons Attribution. Download (15MB) | Preview

Abstract

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 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 subsample. 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.

Item Type:	Article
Uncontrolled Keywords:	0201 Astronomical and Space Sciences; 0202 Atomic, Molecular, Nuclear, Particle and Plasma Physics; 0306 Physical Chemistry (incl. Structural); Astronomy & Astrophysics
Subjects:	Q Science > QB Astronomy Q Science > QC Physics
Divisions:	Astrophysics Research Institute
Publisher:	American Astornomical Society and IOP Publishing
Date of acceptance:	14 October 2022
Date of first compliant Open Access:	15 March 2023
Date Deposited:	15 Mar 2023 13:26
Last Modified:	05 Jul 2025 09:30
DOI or ID number:	10.3847/1538-4357/aca283
URI:	https://researchonline.ljmu.ac.uk/id/eprint/19098

View Item