We present multiwavelength studies of a transient X-ray source, XMMSL1 J131952.3+225958, associated with the galaxy NGC 5092 at z=0.023 detected in the XMM-Newton SLew survey (XMMSL). The source brightened in the 0.2--2 keV band by a factor of >20 in 2005 as compared with previous flux limits and then faded by a factor of >200 as observed with it XMM-Newton in 2013 and with it Swift in 2018. At the flaring state, the X-ray spectrum can be modeled with a blackbody at a temperature of ∼ 60 eV and an overall luminosity of ∼1.5×1043 erg s−1. A UV flare and optical flare were also detected with the Galaxy Evolution Explorer and the Sloan Digital Sky Survey, respectively, within several months of the X-ray flare, whose nonstellar UV--optical spectrum can be described with a blackbody at a temperature of ∼(1−2)×104 K and a luminosity of ∼(2−6)×1043 erg s−1. Interestingly, mid-infrared monitoring observations of NGC 5092 with the Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer 5--13 yr later show a continuous flux decline. These dramatic variability properties, from the X-ray through UV and optical to infrared, appear to be orderly, suggestive of a stellar tidal disruption event (TDE) by a massive black hole, confirming the postulation by Kanner et al.(2013). This TDE candidate belongs to a rare sample with contemporaneous bright emission detected in the X-ray, UV, and optical, which are later echoed by dust-reprocessed light in the mid-infrared. The black hole has a mass of ∼5×107M⊙, residing in a galaxy that is dominated by a middle-aged stellar population of 2.5 Gyr.
@article{arxiv.2003.09066,
title = {Multiwavelength Study of an X-ray Tidal Disruption Event Candidate in NGC 5092},
author = {Dongyue Li and R. D. Saxton and Weimin Yuan and Luming Sun and He-Yang Liu and Ning Jiang and Huaqing Cheng and Hongyan Zhou and S. Komossa and Chichuan Jin},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2003.09066},
year = {2020}
}
Comments
24 pages, 13 figures, accepted for publication in ApJ