A loud quasi-periodic oscillation after a star is disrupted by a massive black hole

• Main Authors: Fragile, P. Chris (Author), Franchini, Alessia (Author), Stone, Nicholas C. (Author), Lodato, Giuseppe (Author), Coughlin, Eric R. (Author), Pasham, Nishanth R. (Author), Pasham, Dheeraj Ranga Reddy (Contributor), Remillard, Ronald A (Contributor), Homan, Jeroen (Contributor), Chakrabarty, Deepto (Contributor), Baganoff, Frederick K (Contributor), Steiner, James F (Contributor)
• Other Authors: MIT Kavli Institute for Astrophysics and Space Research (Contributor)
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Published: American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS), 2019-03-12T19:22:20Z.
• Subjects: Article
• Online Access: Get fulltext

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.
United States. National Aeronautics and Space Administration (Grant PF6-170156)
United States. National Aeronautics and Space Administration (Grant PF6-170150)
United States. National Aeronautics and Space Administration (Grant PF5-160144)
United States. National Aeronautics and Space Administration (Grant PF5-160145)
United States. National Aeronautics and Space Administration (Award SV2-82023)