Discovering periodic and repeating nuclear transients in the XMM-Newton archives
Abstract
The regions around massive black holes can show X-ray variability on timescales from seconds to decades. Observing many black holes over different timescales can enhance our chances of detecting variability coming from (partial) tidal disruption events, massive black hole binaries, changing state AGN, blazar activity and much more. X-ray catalogues with hundreds of thousands of detections are treasure troves of such sources, which require innovative methods to identify these black holes. We present the current XMM-Newton catalogues available and describe several examples of tidal disruption events (TDEs) and quasi-periodic eruption sources that have been found whilst mining this data. We describe preliminary work on a search for periodic variables in the XMM-Newton EPIC archival data, with the example of finding new massive black hole binaries. We also describe the STONKS pipeline that is now in the XMM-Newton automatic reduction pipeline and the near real-time alert system that allows the follow-up of new and fading transients. We provide examples of fading sources that are newly identified candidate TDEs.
Keywords
Cite
@article{arxiv.2511.17385,
title = {Discovering periodic and repeating nuclear transients in the XMM-Newton archives},
author = {Natalie A. Webb and Vincent Foustoul and Robbie Webbe and Matteo Bachetti and Erwan Quintin and Laurent Michel},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2511.17385},
year = {2025}
}
Comments
6 pages, 1 figure. Proceedings of "X-ray Quasi-Periodic Eruptions and Repeating Nuclear Transients", 16-19 June 2025, ESAC, Madrid. Submitted to Astronomische Nachrichten