English

Unprecedented X-ray Emission from the Fast Blue Optical Transient AT2022tsd

High Energy Astrophysical Phenomena 2023-06-05 v1

Abstract

We present the X-ray monitoring campaign of AT2022tsd in the time range δtrest=23116\delta t_{rest} = 23 - 116 d rest-frame since discovery. With an initial 0.3-10 keV X-ray luminosity of Lx1044L_x \approx 10^{44} erg s1^{-1} at δtrest\delta t_{rest}\approx 23 d, AT2022tsd is the most luminous FBOT to date and rivals even the most luminous GRBs. We find no statistical evidence for spectral evolution. The average X-ray spectrum is well described by an absorbed simple power-law spectral model with best-fitting photon index Γ=1.890.08+0.09\Gamma = 1.89 ^{+0.09}_{-0.08} and marginal evidence at the 3σ\sigma confidence level for intrinsic absorption NHint4×1019NH_{int}\approx 4\times10^{19} cm2^{-2}. The X-ray light-curve behavior can be either interpreted as a power-law decay LxtαL_x\propto t^{\alpha} with α2\alpha\approx -2 and superimposed X-ray variability, or as a broken power-law with a steeper post-break decay as observed in other FBOTs such as AT2018cow. We briefly compare these results to accretion models of TDEs and GRB afterglow models.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2306.01114,
  title  = {Unprecedented X-ray Emission from the Fast Blue Optical Transient AT2022tsd},
  author = {D. J. Matthews and R. Margutti and B. D. Metzger and D. Milisavljevic and G. Migliori and T. Laskar and D. Brethauer and E. Berger and R. Chornock and M. Drout and E. Ramirez-Ruiz},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2306.01114},
  year   = {2023}
}

Comments

5 pages, 1 figure, 1 table. Submitted to RNAAS