Abstract
Massive black holes (BHs) at the centres of massive galaxies are ubiquitous. The population of BHs within dwarf galaxies, on the other hand, is not yet known. Dwarf galaxies are thought to harbour BHs with proportionally small masses, including intermediate-mass BHs, with masses 102 < MBH < 106 solar masses (M⊙). Identification of these systems has historically relied on the detection of light emitted from accreting gaseous disks close to the BHs. Without this light, they are difficult to detect. Tidal disruption events, the luminous flares produced when a star strays close to a BH and is shredded, are a direct way to probe massive BHs. The rise times of these flares theoretically correlate with the BH mass. Here we present AT 2020neh, a fast-rising tidal disruption event candidate, hosted by a dwarf galaxy. AT 2020neh can be described by the tidal disruption of a main sequence star by a 104.7–105.9 M⊙ BH. We find the observable rate of fast-rising nuclear transients like AT 2020neh to be low, at ≲2 × 10−8 events Mpc−3 yr−1. Finding non-accreting BHs in dwarf galaxies is important to determine how prevalent BHs are within these galaxies, and to constrain models of BH formation. AT 2020neh-like events may provide a galaxy-independent method of measuring the masses of intermediate-mass BHs.
| Original language | English (US) |
|---|---|
| Pages (from-to) | 1452-1463 |
| Number of pages | 12 |
| Journal | Nature Astronomy |
| Volume | 6 |
| Issue number | 12 |
| DOIs | |
| State | Published - Dec 2022 |
All Science Journal Classification (ASJC) codes
- Astronomy and Astrophysics
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A fast-rising tidal disruption event from a candidate intermediate-mass black hole. / Angus, C. R.; Baldassare, V. F.; Mockler, B. et al.
In: Nature Astronomy, Vol. 6, No. 12, 12.2022, p. 1452-1463.Research output: Contribution to journal › Article › peer-review
TY - JOUR
T1 - A fast-rising tidal disruption event from a candidate intermediate-mass black hole
AU - Angus, C. R.
AU - Baldassare, V. F.
AU - Mockler, B.
AU - Foley, R. J.
AU - Ramirez-Ruiz, E.
AU - Raimundo, S. I.
AU - French, K. D.
AU - Auchettl, K.
AU - Pfister, H.
AU - Gall, C.
AU - Hjorth, J.
AU - Drout, M. R.
AU - Alexander, K. D.
AU - Dimitriadis, G.
AU - Hung, T.
AU - Jones, D. O.
AU - Rest, A.
AU - Siebert, M. R.
AU - Taggart, K.
AU - Terreran, G.
AU - Tinyanont, S.
AU - Carroll, C. M.
AU - DeMarchi, L.
AU - Earl, N.
AU - Gagliano, A.
AU - Izzo, L.
AU - Villar, V. A.
AU - Zenati, Y.
AU - Arendse, N.
AU - Cold, C.
AU - de Boer, T. J.L.
AU - Chambers, K. C.
AU - Coulter, D. A.
AU - Khetan, N.
AU - Lin, C. C.
AU - Magnier, E. A.
AU - Rojas-Bravo, C.
AU - Wainscoat, R. J.
AU - Wojtak, R.
N1 - Funding Information: We thank M. Pursiainen for insightful discussions regarding the spectroscopic evolution of this event, and M. Briday for useful instructions regarding the use of PROSPECTOR. C.R.A., J.H., K.A., L.I., C.C., N.K. and R.W. were supported by VILLUM FONDEN Investigator grant (project number 16599). C.R.A., C.G. and L.I. were supported by a VILLUM FONDEN Young Investigator Grant (project number 25501). B.M. acknowledges support from the AAUW Dissertation Fellowship under Swift grant number 80NSSC21K1409. R.J.F., T.H., M.R.S., K.T., S.T. and C.R.-B. were supported in part by NASA grant number 80NSSC20K0953, NSF grant number AST–1815935, the Gordon & Betty Moore Foundation, the Heising-Simons Foundation, and by a fellowship from the David and Lucile Packard Foundation to R.J.F. E.R.-R. acknowledges support from the Heising-Simons Foundation, Nasa Swift and NICER and NSF (grant numbers AST-1911206 and AST-1852393). S.I.R. has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under the Marie Sklodowska-Curie grant agreement number 891744. Parts of this research were supported by the Australian Research Council Centre of Excellence for All Sky Astrophysics in 3 Dimensions (ASTRO 3D), through project number CE170100013 and the Australian Research Council Centre of Excellence for Gravitational Wave Discovery (OzGrav) through project number CE170100004. H.P. acknowledges support from the Danish National Research Foundation (grant number DNRF132) and the Hong Kong government (GRF grant numbers HKU27305119 and HKU17304821). M.R.D acknowledges support from the NSERC through grant number RGPIN-2019-06186, the Canada Research Chairs Program, the Canadian Institute for Advanced Research (CIFAR) and the Dunlap Institute at the University of Toronto. D.O.J. is supported by NASA through the NASA Hubble Fellowship grant number HF2-51462.001 awarded by the Space Telescope Science Institute, which is operated by the Association of Universities for Research in Astronomy, Inc., for NASA, under contract number NAS 5-26555. M.R.S. is supported by the National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship Program under grant number. 1842400. D.A.C. acknowledges support from the National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship under grant number DGE1339067. A.G. is supported by the National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship Program under grant number DGE-1746047. A.G. also acknowledges funding from the Center for Astrophysical Surveys Fellowship at UIUC/NCSA and the Illinois Distinguished Fellowship. Some of the data presented herein were obtained at the W. M. Keck Observatory, which is operated as a scientific partnership among the California Institute of Technology, the University of California and NASA. The Observatory was made possible by the generous financial support of the W. M. Keck Foundation. We wish to recognize and acknowledge the very important cultural role and reverence that the summit of Maunakea has always had within the indigenous Hawaiian community. We are most fortunate to have the opportunity to conduct observations from this mountain. Based on observations made with the Nordic Optical Telescope, owned in collaboration by the University of Turku and Aarhus University, and operated jointly by Aarhus University, the University of Turku and the University of Oslo, representing Denmark, Finland and Norway, the University of Iceland and Stockholm University at the Observatorio del Roque de los Muchachos, La Palma, Spain, of the Instituto de Astrofisica de Canarias. Observations were carried out under programme P61-022. A major upgrade of the Kast spectrograph on the Shane 3 m telescope at Lick Observatory was made possible through generous gifts from the Heising-Simons Foundation as well as W. Kast and M. Kast. Research at Lick Observatory is partially supported by a generous gift from Google. This research is based on observations made with the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope obtained from the Space Telescope Science Institute, which is operated by the Association of Universities for Research in Astronomy, Inc., under NASA contract number NAS 5–26555. These observations are associated with programme SNAP-16239. We acknowledge the use of public data from the Swift data archive. Based on observations obtained at the international Gemini Observatory (programme numberGN-2020A-DD-111), a programme of NSF’s NOIRLab, which is managed by the Association of Universities for Research in Astronomy (AURA) under a cooperative agreement with the National Science Foundation on behalf of the Gemini Observatory partnership: the National Science Foundation (United States), the National Research Council (Canada), the Agencia Nacional de Investigación y Desarrollo (Chile), the Ministerio de Ciencia, Tecnología e Innovación (Argentina), the Ministério da Ciência, Tecnologia, Inovações e Comunicações (Brazil) and the Korea Astronomy and Space Science Institute (Republic of Korea). We thank the Director for supporting this programme. Based in part on observations obtained with the Samuel Oschin 48-inch Telescope at the Palomar Observatory as part of the Zwicky Transient Facility project. ZTF is supported by the NSF under grant number AST-1440341 and a collaboration including Caltech, IPAC, the Weizmann Institute for Science, the Oskar Klein Center at Stockholm University, the University of Maryland, the University of Washington, Deutsches Elektronen-Synchrotron and Humboldt University, Los Alamos National Laboratories, the TANGO Consortium of Taiwan, the University of Wisconsin at Milwaukee and the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. Operations are conducted by the Caltech Optical Observatories (COO), the Infrared Processing and Analysis Center (IPAC) and the University of Washington (UW). The Pan-STARRS1 Surveys (PS1) and the PS1 public science archive have been made possible through contributions by the Institute for Astronomy, the University of Hawaii, the Pan-STARRS Project Office, the Max Planck Society and its participating institutes, the Max Planck Institute for Astronomy, Heidelberg, and the Max Planck Institute for Extraterrestrial Physics, Garching, The Johns Hopkins University, Durham University, the University of Edinburgh, the Queen’s University Belfast, the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, the Las Cumbres Observatory Global Telescope Network Incorporated, the National Central University of Taiwan, STScI, NASA under grant number NNX08AR22G issued through the Planetary Science Division of the NASA Science Mission Directorate, NSF grant number AST-1238877, the University of Maryland, Eotvos Lorand University (ELTE), the Los Alamos National Laboratory and the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation. Funding Information: We thank M. Pursiainen for insightful discussions regarding the spectroscopic evolution of this event, and M. Briday for useful instructions regarding the use of PROSPECTOR. C.R.A., J.H., K.A., L.I., C.C., N.K. and R.W. were supported by VILLUM FONDEN Investigator grant (project number 16599). C.R.A., C.G. and L.I. were supported by a VILLUM FONDEN Young Investigator Grant (project number 25501). B.M. acknowledges support from the AAUW Dissertation Fellowship under Swift grant number 80NSSC21K1409. R.J.F., T.H., M.R.S., K.T., S.T. and C.R.-B. were supported in part by NASA grant number 80NSSC20K0953, NSF grant number AST–1815935, the Gordon & Betty Moore Foundation, the Heising-Simons Foundation, and by a fellowship from the David and Lucile Packard Foundation to R.J.F. E.R.-R. acknowledges support from the Heising-Simons Foundation, Nasa Swift and NICER and NSF (grant numbers AST-1911206 and AST-1852393). S.I.R. has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under the Marie Sklodowska-Curie grant agreement number 891744. Parts of this research were supported by the Australian Research Council Centre of Excellence for All Sky Astrophysics in 3 Dimensions (ASTRO 3D), through project number CE170100013 and the Australian Research Council Centre of Excellence for Gravitational Wave Discovery (OzGrav) through project number CE170100004. H.P. acknowledges support from the Danish National Research Foundation (grant number DNRF132) and the Hong Kong government (GRF grant numbers HKU27305119 and HKU17304821). M.R.D acknowledges support from the NSERC through grant number RGPIN-2019-06186, the Canada Research Chairs Program, the Canadian Institute for Advanced Research (CIFAR) and the Dunlap Institute at the University of Toronto. D.O.J. is supported by NASA through the NASA Hubble Fellowship grant number HF2-51462.001 awarded by the Space Telescope Science Institute, which is operated by the Association of Universities for Research in Astronomy, Inc., for NASA, under contract number NAS 5-26555. M.R.S. is supported by the National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship Program under grant number. 1842400. D.A.C. acknowledges support from the National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship under grant number DGE1339067. A.G. is supported by the National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship Program under grant number DGE-1746047. A.G. also acknowledges funding from the Center for Astrophysical Surveys Fellowship at UIUC/NCSA and the Illinois Distinguished Fellowship. Some of the data presented herein were obtained at the W. M. Keck Observatory, which is operated as a scientific partnership among the California Institute of Technology, the University of California and NASA. The Observatory was made possible by the generous financial support of the W. M. Keck Foundation. We wish to recognize and acknowledge the very important cultural role and reverence that the summit of Maunakea has always had within the indigenous Hawaiian community. We are most fortunate to have the opportunity to conduct observations from this mountain. Based on observations made with the Nordic Optical Telescope, owned in collaboration by the University of Turku and Aarhus University, and operated jointly by Aarhus University, the University of Turku and the University of Oslo, representing Denmark, Finland and Norway, the University of Iceland and Stockholm University at the Observatorio del Roque de los Muchachos, La Palma, Spain, of the Instituto de Astrofisica de Canarias. Observations were carried out under programme P61-022. A major upgrade of the Kast spectrograph on the Shane 3 m telescope at Lick Observatory was made possible through generous gifts from the Heising-Simons Foundation as well as W. Kast and M. Kast. Research at Lick Observatory is partially supported by a generous gift from Google. This research is based on observations made with the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope obtained from the Space Telescope Science Institute, which is operated by the Association of Universities for Research in Astronomy, Inc., under NASA contract number NAS 5–26555. These observations are associated with programme SNAP-16239. We acknowledge the use of public data from the Swift data archive. Based on observations obtained at the international Gemini Observatory (programme numberGN-2020A-DD-111), a programme of NSF’s NOIRLab, which is managed by the Association of Universities for Research in Astronomy (AURA) under a cooperative agreement with the National Science Foundation on behalf of the Gemini Observatory partnership: the National Science Foundation (United States), the National Research Council (Canada), the Agencia Nacional de Investigación y Desarrollo (Chile), the Ministerio de Ciencia, Tecnología e Innovación (Argentina), the Ministério da Ciência, Tecnologia, Inovações e Comunicações (Brazil) and the Korea Astronomy and Space Science Institute (Republic of Korea). We thank the Director for supporting this programme. Based in part on observations obtained with the Samuel Oschin 48-inch Telescope at the Palomar Observatory as part of the Zwicky Transient Facility project. ZTF is supported by the NSF under grant number AST-1440341 and a collaboration including Caltech, IPAC, the Weizmann Institute for Science, the Oskar Klein Center at Stockholm University, the University of Maryland, the University of Washington, Deutsches Elektronen-Synchrotron and Humboldt University, Los Alamos National Laboratories, the TANGO Consortium of Taiwan, the University of Wisconsin at Milwaukee and the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. Operations are conducted by the Caltech Optical Observatories (COO), the Infrared Processing and Analysis Center (IPAC) and the University of Washington (UW). The Pan-STARRS1 Surveys (PS1) and the PS1 public science archive have been made possible through contributions by the Institute for Astronomy, the University of Hawaii, the Pan-STARRS Project Office, the Max Planck Society and its participating institutes, the Max Planck Institute for Astronomy, Heidelberg, and the Max Planck Institute for Extraterrestrial Physics, Garching, The Johns Hopkins University, Durham University, the University of Edinburgh, the Queen’s University Belfast, the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, the Las Cumbres Observatory Global Telescope Network Incorporated, the National Central University of Taiwan, STScI, NASA under grant number NNX08AR22G issued through the Planetary Science Division of the NASA Science Mission Directorate, NSF grant number AST-1238877, the University of Maryland, Eotvos Lorand University (ELTE), the Los Alamos National Laboratory and the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation. Publisher Copyright: © 2022, The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Nature Limited.
PY - 2022/12
Y1 - 2022/12
N2 - Massive black holes (BHs) at the centres of massive galaxies are ubiquitous. The population of BHs within dwarf galaxies, on the other hand, is not yet known. Dwarf galaxies are thought to harbour BHs with proportionally small masses, including intermediate-mass BHs, with masses 102 < MBH < 106 solar masses (M⊙). Identification of these systems has historically relied on the detection of light emitted from accreting gaseous disks close to the BHs. Without this light, they are difficult to detect. Tidal disruption events, the luminous flares produced when a star strays close to a BH and is shredded, are a direct way to probe massive BHs. The rise times of these flares theoretically correlate with the BH mass. Here we present AT 2020neh, a fast-rising tidal disruption event candidate, hosted by a dwarf galaxy. AT 2020neh can be described by the tidal disruption of a main sequence star by a 104.7–105.9 M⊙ BH. We find the observable rate of fast-rising nuclear transients like AT 2020neh to be low, at ≲2 × 10−8 events Mpc−3 yr−1. Finding non-accreting BHs in dwarf galaxies is important to determine how prevalent BHs are within these galaxies, and to constrain models of BH formation. AT 2020neh-like events may provide a galaxy-independent method of measuring the masses of intermediate-mass BHs.
AB - Massive black holes (BHs) at the centres of massive galaxies are ubiquitous. The population of BHs within dwarf galaxies, on the other hand, is not yet known. Dwarf galaxies are thought to harbour BHs with proportionally small masses, including intermediate-mass BHs, with masses 102 < MBH < 106 solar masses (M⊙). Identification of these systems has historically relied on the detection of light emitted from accreting gaseous disks close to the BHs. Without this light, they are difficult to detect. Tidal disruption events, the luminous flares produced when a star strays close to a BH and is shredded, are a direct way to probe massive BHs. The rise times of these flares theoretically correlate with the BH mass. Here we present AT 2020neh, a fast-rising tidal disruption event candidate, hosted by a dwarf galaxy. AT 2020neh can be described by the tidal disruption of a main sequence star by a 104.7–105.9 M⊙ BH. We find the observable rate of fast-rising nuclear transients like AT 2020neh to be low, at ≲2 × 10−8 events Mpc−3 yr−1. Finding non-accreting BHs in dwarf galaxies is important to determine how prevalent BHs are within these galaxies, and to constrain models of BH formation. AT 2020neh-like events may provide a galaxy-independent method of measuring the masses of intermediate-mass BHs.
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U2 - 10.1038/s41550-022-01811-y
DO - 10.1038/s41550-022-01811-y
M3 - Article
AN - SCOPUS:85141727466
SN - 2397-3366
VL - 6
SP - 1452
EP - 1463
JO - Nature Astronomy
JF - Nature Astronomy
IS - 12
ER -