Integral Field Spectroscopy of 13 Tidal Disruption Event Hosts from the Zwicky Transient Facility Survey

Creators: Hammerstein, Erica^{1, 2, 3}; Cenko, S. Bradley^{1, 3}; Gezari, Suvi^{4, 5}; Veilleux, Sylvain¹; O'Connor, Brendan^{1, 2, 6}; van Velzen, Sjoert⁷; Ward, Charlotte⁸; Yao, Yuhan⁹; Graham, Matthew⁹

1. University of Maryland, College Park
2. Astrophysics Science Division, NASA Goddard Space Flight Center, 8800 Greenbelt Road, Greenbelt, MD 20771, USA
3. Goddard Space Flight Center
4. Space Telescope Science Institute
5. Johns Hopkins University
6. George Washington University
7. Leiden University
8. Princeton University
9. California Institute of Technology

Abstract

The host galaxies of tidal disruption events (TDEs) have been shown to possess peculiar properties, including high central light concentrations, unusual star formation histories, and "green" colors. The ubiquity of these large-scale galaxy characteristics among TDE host populations suggests that they may serve to boost the TDE rate in such galaxies by influencing the nuclear stellar dynamics. We present the first population study of integral field spectroscopy for 13 TDE host galaxies across all spectral classes and X-ray brightnesses with the purpose of investigating their large-scale properties. We derive the black hole masses via stellar kinematics (i.e., the M–σ relation) and find masses in the range 5.0 ≲ log (M_(BH)/M⊙) ≲ 8.0, with a distribution dominated by black holes with M_BH ∼ 10⁶M_⊙. We find one object with M_BH ≳ 10⁸M_⊙, above the "Hills mass", which if the disrupted star was of solar type, allows a lower limit of a ≳ 0.16 to be placed on its spin, lending further support to the proposed connection between featureless TDEs and jetted TDEs. We also explore the level of rotational support in the TDE hosts, quantified by (V/σ)_e, a parameter that has been shown to correlate with the stellar age and may explain the peculiar host-galaxy preferences of TDEs. We find that the TDE hosts exhibit a broad range in (V/σ)_e following a similar distribution as E + A galaxies, which have been shown to be overrepresented among TDE host populations.

Copyright and License

Original content from this work may be used under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 licence. Any further distribution of this work must maintain attribution to the author(s) and the title of the work, journal citation and DOI.

Acknowledgement

We thank the anonymous referee for the helpful comments toward improving this paper. E.H. acknowledges support by NASA under award No. 80GSFC21M0002.

These results made use of the Lowell Discovery Telescope (LDT) at Lowell Observatory. Lowell is a private, nonprofit institution dedicated to astrophysical research and public appreciation of astronomy and operates the LDT in partnership with Boston University, the University of Maryland, the University of Toledo, Northern Arizona University, and Yale University. The Large Monolithic Imager was built by Lowell Observatory using funds provided by the National Science Foundation (AST-1005313).

The data presented here were obtained at the W. M. Keck Observatory, which is operated as a scientific partnership among the California Institute of Technology, the University of California, and the National Aeronautics and Space Administration. The Observatory was made possible by the generous financial support of the W. M. Keck Foundation. The authors wish to recognize and acknowledge the very significant cultural role and reverence that the summit of Maunakea has always had within the indigenous Hawaiian community. We are most fortunate to have the opportunity to conduct observations from this mountain.

The SAMI Galaxy Survey is based on observations made at the Anglo-Australian Telescope. The Sydney-AAO Multi-object Integral field spectrograph (SAMI) was developed jointly by the University of Sydney and the Australian Astronomical Observatory. The SAMI input catalog is based on data taken from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey, the GAMA Survey, and the VST ATLAS Survey. The SAMI Galaxy Survey is supported by the Australian Research Council Centre of Excellence for All Sky Astrophysics in 3 Dimensions (ASTRO 3D), through project No. CE170100013, the Australian Research Council Centre of Excellence for All-sky Astrophysics (CAASTRO), through project No. CE110001020, and other participating institutions. The SAMI Galaxy Survey website is http://sami-survey.org.

The data analysis in this paper was performed on the Yorp and Astra clusters administered by the Center for Theory and Computation, part of the Department of Astronomy at the University of Maryland.

Facilities

LDT (LMI) - , Keck:II (KCWI) - KECK II Telescope.

Software References

GALFIT, KCWI-DRP, CWITools, GIST, ppxf.

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