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

January 2023 • 2023ApJ...942....9H

Authors • 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 • van Roestel, Jan • Sharma, Yashvi • Sollerman, Jesper • Taggart, Kirsty • Yan, Lin

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.

Links

• PREPRINT http://arxiv.org/abs/2203.01461
• NED https://ned.ipac.caltech.edu/uri/NED::InRefcode/2023ApJ...942....9H
• ELECTR https://doi.org/10.3847%2F1538-4357%2Faca283
• SIMBAD http://simbad.u-strasbg.fr/simbo.pl?bibcode=2023ApJ...942....9H
• DATA http://archive.eso.org/bin/ads2eso?2023ApJ...942....9H
• DATA http://heasarc.gsfc.nasa.gov/cgi-bin/W3Browse/biblink.pl?code=2023ApJ...942....9H
• DATA https://archive.stsci.edu/mastbibref.php?bibcode=2023ApJ...942....9H