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

  • Erica Hammerstein*
  • , Sjoert van Velzen
  • , Suvi Gezari
  • , S. Bradley Cenko
  • , Yuhan Yao
  • , Charlotte Ward
  • , Sara Frederick
  • , Natalia Villanueva
  • , Jean J. Somalwar
  • , Matthew J. Graham
  • , Shrinivas R. Kulkarni
  • , Daniel Stern
  • , Igor Andreoni
  • , Eric C. Bellm
  • , Richard Dekany
  • , Suhail Dhawan
  • , Andrew J. Drake
  • , Christoffer Fremling
  • , Pradip Gatkine
  • , Steven L. Groom
  • Anna Y. Q. Ho, Mansi M. Kasliwal, Viraj Karambelkar, Erik C. Kool, Frank J. Masci, Michael S. Medford, Daniel A. Perley, Josiah Purdum, Jan van Roestel, Yashvi Sharma, Jesper Sollerman, Kirsty Taggart, Lin Yan
*Corresponding author for this work

Research output: Contribution to journalArticlepeer-review

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.

Original languageEnglish
Article number9
Number of pages35
JournalAstrophysical Journal
Volume942
Issue number1
Early online date28 Dec 2022
DOIs
Publication statusPublished - 1 Jan 2023

Bibliographical note

Copyright:
© 2022. The Author(s).

ASJC Scopus subject areas

  • Astronomy and Astrophysics
  • Space and Planetary Science

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