A loud quasi-periodic oscillation after a star is disrupted by a massive black hole
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1810.10713.pdf
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Author(s)
Fragile, P. Chris
Franchini, Alessia
Stone, Nicholas C.
Lodato, Giuseppe
Coughlin, Eric R.
Pasham, Nishanth R.
Pasham, Dheeraj Ranga Reddy
Remillard, Ronald A
Homan, Jeroen
Chakrabarty, Deepto
Alternative Title
A loud quasi-periodic oscillation after a star is disrupted by a massive black hole
Date Issued
December 2018
Journal
Science
Publisher
American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS)
Citation
Pasham, Dheeraj R. et al. “A Loud Quasi-Periodic Oscillation after a Star Is Disrupted by a Massive Black Hole.” Science 363, 6426 (January 2019): 531–534 © 2017 The Authors
Version
Original manuscript
Abstract
The tidal forces close to massive black holes can rip apart stars that come too close to them. As the resulting stellar debris spirals toward the black hole, the debris heats up and emits x-rays. We report observations of a stable 131-second x-ray quasi-periodic oscillation from the tidal disruption event ASASSN-14li. Assuming the black hole mass indicated by host galaxy scaling relations, these observations imply that the periodicity originates from close to the event horizon and that the black hole is rapidly spinning. Our findings demonstrate that tidal disruption events can generate quasi-periodic oscillations that encode information about the physical properties of their black holes.
MIT Department
MIT Kavli Institute for Astrophysics and Space Research
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Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike
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DOI of Published Version
https://doi.org/10.1126/science.aar7480
