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
Hauptverfasser: Lin, Dacheng, Godet, Olivier, Webb, Natalie A, Barret, Didier, Irwin, Jimmy A, Komossa, S, Ramirez-Ruiz, Enrico, Maksym, W Peter, Grupe, Dirk, Carrasco, Eleazar R
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Sprache:eng
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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.
ISSN:2331-8422
DOI:10.48550/arxiv.2112.11545