Tidal disruption event J150052 was caused by a rapidly spinning intermediate-mass black hole, study finds

Utilizing NASA’s Chandra and ESA’s XMM-Newton space telescopes, astronomers from the Radboud College within the Netherlands and elsewhere have carried out X-ray observations of a tidal disruption occasion designated 3XMM J150052.0+015452, or J150052 for brief. The outcomes present that J150052 was triggered by a quickly spinning intermediate-mass black hole. The discovering was detailed in a paper revealed November 30 on arXiv.org.

Tidal disruption occasions (TDEs) are astronomical phenomena that happen when a star passes shut sufficient to a supermassive black hole and is pulled aside by the black hole’s tidal forces, inflicting the method of disruption. Such tidally disrupted stellar particles begins raining down on the black hole and radiation emerges from the innermost area of accreting particles, which is an indicator of the presence of a TDE.

For astronomers and astrophysicists, TDEs are doubtlessly necessary probes of robust gravity and accretion physics, offering solutions concerning the formation and evolution of supermassive black holes.

J150052 was first detected in 2005 as an X-ray supply, throughout XMM-Newton and Chandra observations of the foreground galaxy group NGC 5813 at a redshift of 0.0064. Its place is coincident with the middle of the galaxy SDSS J150052.07+015453.8 at a redshift of 0.145.

Observe-up observations of this supply have discovered that it’s a slowly-decaying TDE, experiencing a decade-long decay. Some research have advised that the black hole answerable for J150052 has a mass of round 100,000 solar plenty, what makes it an intermediate-mass black hole (IMBH).

Now, a crew of astronomers led by Radboud’s Zheng Cao presents the outcomes of their research confirming the IMBH speculation.

“On this paper, we current and analyze all of the publicly accessible XMMNewton and Chandra information of the tidal disruption occasion J150052 since 2008, obtained throughout its decade-long decay. We match the X-ray spectra with the slim disk mannequin (Wen et al. 2020, 2021), thereby constraining the black hole mass and spin to a better precision than beforehand doable,” the researchers wrote.

The black hole mass for J150052 was measured to be about 200,000 solar masses. The dimensionless spin parameter of the black hole was calculated to be not less than 0.97. Due to this fact, the researchers concluded that J150052 is a quick spinning, and maybe near-extremal, IMBH.

The mass and spin measurements point out that J150052 didn’t type close to its present mass. Therefore, the authors of the paper assume that the black hole will need to have accreted as much as its present mass in episodes the place the angular momentum vectors of the spin and accreted materials had been aligned.

Moreover, the spectral analyses of J150052 means that it undergoes a transition throughout its decay, quenching the corona whereas the mass accretion price decreases from super-Eddington to Eddington ranges. The research additionally discovered that the corona of J150052 to be optically thick and heat.

Summing up the outcomes, the researchers famous that their findings exhibit the potential of utilizing the X-ray spectra of TDEs to seek out IMBHs and measure their plenty and spins.

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