Follow-up Observations of the Prolonged, super-Eddington, Tidal Disruption Event Candidate 3XMM~J150052.0+015452: the Slow Decline Continues
The X-ray source 3XMM~J150052.0+015452 was discovered as a spectacular tidal disruption event candidate during a prolonged (\(>11\) yrs) outburst (Lin et al. 2017). It exhibited unique quasi-soft X-ray spectra of characteristic temperature \(kT\sim0.3\) keV for several years at the peak, but in a...
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Veröffentlicht in: | arXiv.org 2021-12 |
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Zusammenfassung: | The X-ray source 3XMM~J150052.0+015452 was discovered as a spectacular tidal disruption event candidate during a prolonged (\(>11\) yrs) outburst (Lin et al. 2017). It exhibited unique quasi-soft X-ray spectra of characteristic temperature \(kT\sim0.3\) keV for several years at the peak, but in a recent Chandra observation (10 yrs into the outburst) a super-soft X-ray spectrum of \(kT\sim0.15\) keV was detected. Such dramatic spectral softening could signal the transition from the super-Eddington to thermal state or the temporary presence of a warm absorber. Here we report on our study of four new XMM-Newton follow-up observations of the source. We found that they all showed super-soft spectra, suggesting that the source had remained super-soft for \(>5\) yrs. Then its spectral change is best explained as due to the super-Eddington to thermal spectral state transition. The fits to the thermal state spectra suggested a smaller absorption toward the source than that obtained in Lin et al. (2017). This led us to update the modeling of the event as due to the disruption of a 0.75 msun star by a massive black hole of a few\(\times10^5\) msun. We also obtained two HST images in the F606W and F814W filters and found that the dwarf star-forming host galaxy can be resolved into a dominant disk and a smaller bulge. No central point source was clearly seen in either filter, ruling out strong optical emission associated with the X-ray activity. |
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ISSN: | 2331-8422 |
DOI: | 10.48550/arxiv.2112.11545 |