Document Type

Article

Publication Date

2-1-2019

Publication Title

Science

Publisher

American Association for the Advancement of Science

Volume

363

Issue

6426

First page number:

531

Last page number:

534

Abstract

The tidal forces close to massive black holes can rip apart stars that come too close to them. As the resulting stellar debris spirals toward the black hole, the debris heats up and emits x-rays. We report observations of a stable 131-second x-ray quasi-periodic oscillation from the tidal disruption event ASASSN-14li. Assuming the black hole mass indicated by host galaxy scaling relations, these observations imply that the periodicity originates from close to the event horizon and that the black hole is rapidly spinning. Our findings demonstrate that tidal disruption events can generate quasi-periodic oscillations that encode information about the physical properties of their black holes.

Disciplines

Physics

File Format

PDF

File Size

3.591 KB

Language

English

Comments

Author correction: There is a typo in the title which is instead "A Remarkably Loud Quasi-Periodicity after a Star is Disrupted by a Massive Black Hole”

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