CaltechAUTHORS
Published January 1, 2023 | Version public
Journal Article Metadata-only

The Final Season Reimagined: 30 Tidal Disruption Events from the ZTF-I Survey

Creators

  • 1. ROR icon University of Maryland, College Park
  • 2. ROR icon Goddard Space Flight Center
  • 3. ROR icon Leiden University
  • 4. ROR icon Space Telescope Science Institute
  • 5. ROR icon California Institute of Technology
  • 6. ROR icon Princeton University
  • 7. ROR icon Vanderbilt University
  • 8. ROR icon Harvard University
  • 9. ROR icon Jet Propulsion Lab
  • 10. ROR icon University of Washington
  • 11. ROR icon University of Cambridge
  • 12. ROR icon Infrared Processing and Analysis Center
  • 13. ROR icon Cornell University
  • 14. ROR icon Stockholm University
  • 15. ROR icon University of California, Berkeley
  • 16. ROR icon Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory
  • 17. ROR icon Liverpool John Moores University
  • 18. ROR icon University of California, Santa Cruz

Abstract

Tidal disruption events (TDEs) offer a unique way to study dormant black holes. While the number of observed TDEs has grown thanks to the emergence of wide-field surveys in the past few decades, questions regarding the nature of the observed optical, UV, and X-ray emission remain. We present a uniformly selected sample of 30 spectroscopically classified TDEs from the Zwicky Transient Facility Phase I survey operations with follow-up Swift UV and X-ray observations. Through our investigation into correlations between light-curve properties, we recover a shallow positive correlation between the peak bolometric luminosity and decay timescales. We introduce a new spectroscopic class of TDE, TDE-featureless, which are characterized by featureless optical spectra. The new TDE-featureless class shows larger peak bolometric luminosities, peak blackbody temperatures, and peak blackbody radii. We examine the differences between the X-ray bright and X-ray faint populations of TDEs in this sample, finding that X-ray bright TDEs show higher peak blackbody luminosities than the X-ray faint subsample. This sample of optically selected TDEs is the largest sample of TDEs from a single survey yet, and the systematic discovery, classification, and follow-up of this sample allows for robust characterization of TDE properties, an important stepping stone looking forward toward the Rubin era.

Additional Information

We thank the anonymous referee for providing helpful comments toward improving this manuscript. We also thank B. Mockler and M. Nicholl for their help with understanding and running the MOSFiT tool. Based on observations obtained with the Samuel Oschin Telescope 48 inch and the 60 inch Telescope at the Palomar Observatory as part of the Zwicky Transient Facility project. ZTF is supported by the National Science Foundation under grant No. AST-1440341 and a collaboration including Caltech, IPAC, the Weizmann Institute for Science, the Oskar Klein Center at Stockholm University, the University of Maryland, the University of Washington, Deutsches Elektronen-Synchrotron and Humboldt University, Los Alamos National Laboratories, the TANGO Consortium of Taiwan, the University of Wisconsin at Milwaukee, and Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratories. Operations are conducted by COO, IPAC, and UW. SED Machine is based upon work supported by the National Science Foundation under grant No. 1106171. The ZTF forced-photometry service was funded under the Heising-Simons Foundation grant #12540303 (PI: Graham). This work was supported by the GROWTH project funded by the National Science Foundation under grant No. 1545949. The material is based upon work supported by NASA under award number 80GSFC21M0002. E.C.K. acknowledges support from the G.R.E.A.T research environment funded by VetenskapsrÅ det, the Swedish Research Council, under project number 2016-06012, and support from The Wenner-Gren Foundations.

Additional details

Identifiers

Eprint ID
118826
Resolver ID
CaltechAUTHORS:20230117-372591200.30

Related works

Describes
https://resolver.caltech.edu/CaltechAUTHORS:20220526-173258641 (URL)

Funding

NSF
AST-1440341
ZTF partner institutions
NSF
AST-1106171
Heising-Simons Foundation
12540303
NSF
OISE-1545949
NASA
80GSFC21M0002
Swedish Research Council
2016-06012
Wenner-Gren Foundation

Dates

Created
2023-02-10
Created from EPrint's datestamp field
Updated
2023-02-10
Created from EPrint's last_modified field

Caltech Custom Metadata

Caltech groups
Astronomy Department, Infrared Processing and Analysis Center (IPAC), Zwicky Transient Facility