Journal
NATURE ASTRONOMY
Volume 6, Issue 12, Pages 1452-+Publisher
NATURE PORTFOLIO
DOI: 10.1038/s41550-022-01811-y
Keywords
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Categories
Funding
- VILLUM FONDEN Investigator grant [16599]
- VILLUM FONDEN Young Investigator Grant [25501]
- AAUW Dissertation Fellowship [80NSSC21K1409]
- NASA [80NSSC20K0953, NAS 5-26555, NNX08AR22G]
- NSF [AST-1815935, AST-1911206, AST-1852393, AST-1440341, AST-1238877]
- Gordon & Betty Moore Foundation
- Heising-Simons Foundation
- David and Lucile Packard Foundation
- Nasa Swift
- NICER
- European Union [891744]
- Australian Research Council Centre of Excellence for All Sky Astrophysics in 3 Dimensions (ASTRO 3D) [CE170100013]
- Australian Research Council Centre of Excellence for Gravitational Wave Discovery (OzGrav) [CE170100004]
- Danish National Research Foundation [DNRF132]
- Hong Kong government [HKU27305119, HKU17304821]
- NSERC [RGPIN-2019-06186]
- Canada Research Chairs Program
- Canadian Institute for Advanced Research (CIFAR)
- Dunlap Institute at the University of Toronto
- NASA through the NASA Hubble Fellowship - Space Telescope Science Institute [HF2-51462.001]
- National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship Program [1842400, DGE-1746047]
- National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship [DGE1339067]
- Center for Astrophysical Surveys Fellowship at UIUC/NCSA
- Illinois Distinguished Fellowship
- W. M. Keck Foundation
- international Gemini Observatory [GN-2020A-DD-111]
- Caltech
- IPAC
- Weizmann Institute for Science
- Oskar Klein Center at Stockholm University
- University of Maryland
- University of Washington
- Deutsches Elektronen-Synchrotron
- Humboldt University
- Los Alamos National Laboratories
- TANGO Consortium of Taiwan
- University of Wisconsin at Milwaukee
- Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory
- [P61-022]
- [SNAP-16239]
- Marie Curie Actions (MSCA) [891744] Funding Source: Marie Curie Actions (MSCA)
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Massive black holes are commonly found in the centers of massive galaxies, but their presence in dwarf galaxies is not yet known. AT 2020neh is a fast-rising tidal disruption event candidate hosted by a dwarf galaxy, which provides a potential method of measuring the masses of intermediate-mass black holes. The observable rate of such events is found to be low, which highlights the importance of finding non-accreting black holes in dwarf galaxies and understanding their prevalence within these galaxies.
Massive black holes (BHs) at the centres of massive galaxies are ubiquitous. The population of BHs within dwarf galaxies, on the other hand, is not yet known. Dwarf galaxies are thought to harbour BHs with proportionally small masses, including intermediate-mass BHs, with masses 10(2) < M-BH < 10(6) solar masses (M-circle dot). Identification of these systems has historically relied on the detection of light emitted from accreting gaseous disks close to the BHs. Without this light, they are difficult to detect. Tidal disruption events, the luminous flares produced when a star strays close to a BH and is shredded, are a direct way to probe massive BHs. The rise times of these flares theoretically correlate with the BH mass. Here we present AT 2020neh, a fast-rising tidal disruption event candidate, hosted by a dwarf galaxy. AT 2020neh can be described by the tidal disruption of a main sequence star by a 10(4.7)-10(5.9) M-circle dot BH. We find the observable rate of fast-rising nuclear transients like AT 2020neh to be low, at less than or similar to 2 x 10(-8) events Mpc(-3) yr(-1). Finding non-accreting BHs in dwarf galaxies is important to determine how prevalent BHs are within these galaxies, and to constrain models of BH formation. AT 2020neh-like events may provide a galaxy-independent method of measuring the masses of intermediate-mass BHs.
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