NUK - logo
E-resources
Full text
Peer reviewed Open access
  • The Final Season Reimagined...
    Hammerstein, Erica; van Velzen, Sjoert; Gezari, Suvi; Cenko, S. Bradley; 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; Roestel, Jan van; Sharma, Yashvi; Sollerman, Jesper; Taggart, Kirsty; Yan, Lin

    The Astrophysical journal, 01/2023, Volume: 942, Issue: 1
    Journal Article

    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.