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Near-Eddington Luminosity Flares from Quiescent Supermassive Black Holes

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  03 June 2010

Suvi Gezari
Suvi Gezari*
Affiliation:
Department of Physics and Astronomy, Johns Hopkins University, 3400 North Charles St., Baltimore, MD 21218, USA Email: suvi@pha.jhu.edu Hubble Fellow
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Abstract

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A dormant supermassive black hole lurking in the center of a galaxy will be revealed when a star passes within its tidal disruption radius, is disrupted, and a flare of electromagnetic radiation is emitted when the bound stellar debris is accreted. Although the tidal disruption of a star is a rare event in a galaxy, ~ 10−4 yr−1, observational candidates have emerged in all-sky X-ray and deep UV surveys in the form of luminous UV/X-ray flares from otherwise quiescent galaxies. We present the light curves and broadband properties of three tidal disruption candidates discovered in the UV by GALEX, and find that (1) the light curves are well-fitted by the power-law decline expected for the fallback of debris from a tidally disrupted solar-type star, and (2) the UV/optical spectral energy distributions can be attributed to thermal emission from an envelope of debris located at ten times the tidal disruption radius of the central black hole. We use the observed peak absolute optical magnitudes of the flares to predict the detection capabilities of the next generation of wide-field optical synoptic surveys.

Keywords

galaxies: nucleiultraviolet: galaxiessurveysaccretion
Type
Contributed Papers
Information
Proceedings of the International Astronomical Union , Volume 5 , Symposium S267: Co-Evolution of Central Black Holes and Galaxies , August 2009 , pp. 319 - 324
Copyright
Copyright © International Astronomical Union 2010

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