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
File Size
3.591 KB
Language
English
Repository Citation
Pasham, D. R.,
Remillard, R. A.,
Fragile, P. C.,
Franchini, A.,
Stone, N. C.,
Lodato, G.,
Homan, J.,
Chakrabarty, D.,
Baganoff, F. K.,
Steiner, J. F.,
Coughlin, E. R.,
Pasham, N. R.
(2019).
A Loud Quasi-periodic Oscillation After a Atar is Disrupted by a Massive Black Hole.
Science, 363(6426),
531-534.
American Association for the Advancement of Science.
http://dx.doi.org/10.1126/science.aar7480
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”