Monthly quasi-periodic eruptions from repeated stellar disruption by a massive black hole

Abstract

In recent years, searches of archival X-ray data have revealed galaxies exhibiting nuclear quasi-periodic eruptions with periods of several hours. These are reminiscent of the tidal disruption of a star by a supermassive black hole. The repeated, partial stripping of a white dwarf in an eccentric orbit around an ~105 M⊙ black hole provides an attractive model. A separate class of periodic nuclear transients, with much longer timescales, have recently been discovered optically and may arise from the partial stripping of a main-sequence star by an ~107 M⊙ black hole. No clear connection between these classes has been made. We present the discovery of an X-ray nuclear transient that shows quasi-periodic outbursts with a period of weeks. We discuss possible origins for the emission and propose that this system bridges the two existing classes outlined above. This discovery was made possible by the rapid identification, dissemination and follow-up of an X-ray transient found by the new live Swift-XRT transient detector, demonstrating the importance of low-latency, sensitive searches for X-ray transients.

Metadata

Item Type:	Article
Authors/Creators:	Evans, P.A. https://orcid.org/0000-0002-8465-3353 Nixon, C.J. https://orcid.org/0000-0002-2137-4146 Campana, S. Charalampopoulos, P. Perley, D.A. Breeveld, A.A. https://orcid.org/0000-0002-0001-7270 Page, K.L. https://orcid.org/0000-0001-5624-2613 Oates, S.R. https://orcid.org/0000-0001-9309-7873 Eyles-Ferris, R.A.J. https://orcid.org/0000-0002-8775-2365 Malesani, D.B. https://orcid.org/0000-0002-7517-326X Izzo, L. https://orcid.org/0000-0001-9695-8472 Goad, M.R. O’Brien, P.T. Osborne, J.P. https://orcid.org/0000-0002-1041-7542 Sbarufatti, B. https://orcid.org/0000-0001-6620-8347
Copyright, Publisher and Additional Information:	© The Author(s) 2023. This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license, and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article’s Creative Commons license, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article’s Creative Commons license and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. To view a copy of this license, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/.
Dates:	Published: November 2023 Published (online): 7 September 2023 Accepted: 7 August 2023
Institution:	The University of Leeds
Academic Units:	The University of Leeds > Faculty of Engineering & Physical Sciences (Leeds) > School of Physics and Astronomy (Leeds) > Astrophysics (Leeds)
Depositing User:	Symplectic Publications
Date Deposited:	02 Nov 2023 14:11
Last Modified:	01 Dec 2023 16:20
Status:	Published
Publisher:	Nature Research
Identification Number:	10.1038/s41550-023-02073-y
Related URLs:	Dataset
Open Archives Initiative ID (OAI ID):	oai:eprints.whiterose.ac.uk:204822