A relativistic jetted outburst from a massive black hole fed by a tidally disrupted star
Abstract
While gas accretion onto some massive black holes (MBHs) at the centers of galaxies actively powers luminous emission, the vast majority of MBHs are considered dormant. Occasionally, a star passing too near a MBH is torn apart by gravitational forces, leading to a bright panchromatic tidal disruption flare (TDF). While the high-energy transient Swift J164449.3+573451 ("Sw 1644+57") initially displayed none of the theoretically anticipated (nor previously observed) TDF characteristics, we show that the observations (Levan et al. 2011) suggest a sudden accretion event onto a central MBH of mass ~10^6-10^7 solar masses. We find evidence for a mildly relativistic outflow, jet collimation, and a spectrum characterized by synchrotron and inverse Compton processes; this leads to a natural analogy of Sw 1644+57 with a smaller-scale blazar. The phenomenologically novel Sw 1644+57 thus connects the study of TDFs and active galaxies, opening a new vista on disk-jet interactions in BHs and magnetic field generation and transport in accretion systems.
Keywords
Cite
@article{arxiv.1104.3257,
title = {A relativistic jetted outburst from a massive black hole fed by a tidally disrupted star},
author = {Joshua S. Bloom and Dimitrios Giannios and Brian D. Metzger and S. Bradley Cenko and Daniel A. Perley and Nathaniel R. Butler and Nial R. Tanvir and Andrew J. Levan and Paul T. O' Brien and Linda E. Strubbe and Fabio De Colle and Enrico Ramirez-Ruiz and William H. Lee and Sergei Nayakshin and Eliot Quataert and Andrew R. King and Antonino Cucchiara and James Guillochon and Geoffrey C. Bower and Andrew S. Fruchter and Adam N. Morgan and Alexander J. van der Horst},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1104.3257},
year = {2015}
}
Comments
Submitted, 32 pages including supplemental online material