Detection of disk-jet co-precession in a tidal disruption event
Abstract
Theories and simulations predict that intense spacetime curvature near black holes bends the trajectories of light and matter, driving disk and jet precession under relativistic torques. However, direct observational evidence of disk-jet co-precession remains elusive. Here, we report the most compelling case to date: a tidal disruption event (TDE) exhibiting unprecedented 19.6-day quasi-periodic variations in both X-rays and radio, with X-ray amplitudes exceeding an order of magnitude. The nearly synchronized X-ray and radio variations suggest a shared mechanism regulating the emission regions. We demonstrate that a disk-jet Lense-Thirring precession model successfully reproduces these variations while requiring a low-spin black hole. This study uncovers previously uncharted short-term radio variability in TDEs, highlights the transformative potential of high-cadence radio monitoring, and offers profound insights into disk-jet physics.
Keywords
Cite
@article{arxiv.2511.12477,
title = {Detection of disk-jet co-precession in a tidal disruption event},
author = {Yanan Wang and Zikun Lin and Linhui Wu and Weihua Lei and Shuyuan Wei and Shuang-Nan Zhang and Long Ji and Santiago del Palacio and Ranieri D. Baldi and Yang Huang and Jifeng Liu and Bing Zhang and Aiyuan Yang and Rurong Chen and Yangwei Zhang and Ailing Wang and Lei Yang and Panos Charalampopoulos and David R. A. Williams-Baldwin and Zhu-Heng Yao and Fu-Guo Xie and Defu Bu and Hua Feng and Xinwu Cao and Hongzhou Wu and Wenxiong Li and Erlin Qiao and Giorgos Leloudas and Joseph P Anderson and Xinwen Shu and Dheeraj R. Pasham and Hu Zou and Matt Nicholl and Thomas Wevers and Tomas E. Muller-Bravo and Jing Wang and Jianyan Wei and Yu-Lei Qiu and Weijian Guo and Claudia P. Gutierrez and Mariusz Gromadzki and Cosimo Inserra and Lydia Makrygianni and Francesca Onori and Tanja Petrushevska and Diego Altamirano and Lluis Galbany and Miguel Perez-Torres and Ting-Wan Chen},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2511.12477},
year = {2026}
}
Comments
accepted version. minor corrections