AT2024lhc and AT2024kmq in the landscape of featureless tidal disruption events
Аннотация
ABSTRACT We study AT2024kmq and AT2024lhc, two tidal disruption events (TDEs) with blue featureless spectra associated with high-mass black holes ($M_{\rm BH}\sim 10^8\, \mathrm{ M}_\odot$). Both events show optical precursors consistent with shock dissipation from stream self-intersection. Their X-ray emission is luminous ($L_{\rm X}\sim 10^{44}\, {\rm erg\, s^{-1}}$), highly variable (with minimum observed variability time-scales of 1.3 and 4.8 h for factor of ∼3 flux changes), long-lasting (>1 yr), emerging no later than the optical peak, and well characterized by power laws with $1.7\lt \Gamma \lt 3$ (where $f_\nu \propto \nu ^{1-\Gamma }$). The X-ray properties and radio non-detections support a compact corona ($\lesssim 10 r_{\rm g}$) producing Comptonized X-ray emission. Using all published featureless TDEs, we find statistically significant bimodality in the distribution of their peak ultraviolet/optical blackbody luminosities and radii. We assemble a comparison TDE sample with early-time X-ray observations with eROSITA, in which we find different $M_{\rm BH}$ distributions in TDEs with different X-ray spectral evolution properties: low-mass black holes ($M_{\rm BH} \sim 10^6 \mathrm{ M}_\odot$) remain soft ($\Gamma \gt 4$) within $t\lesssim 2$ yr, intermediate masses ($\sim 10^7 \mathrm{ M}_\odot$) transition from soft to hard at $\sim$1 yr, while high masses ($\sim 10^8 \mathrm{ M}_\odot$) are hard ($1.5\lt \Gamma \lesssim 3$) from the outset. We interpret this result as evidence that the soft-to-hard state transition in TDEs occurs at the critical threshold of $\dot{M}_{\rm acc} \sim 0.03 \dot{M}_{\rm Edd}$ (similar to X-ray binaries), using the fact that the transition time-scale predicted by simple disc theory scales with black hole mass as $t_{\rm tr}\propto M_{\rm BH}^{-3/4}$.
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