The detections more than double the number of known tidal disruption events in the nearby universe.
Star-shredding black holes are everywhere in the sky if you just know how to look for them. That’s one message from a new study by
“The majority of these sources don’t show up in optical bands,” says lead author Megan Masterson, a graduate student in MIT’s Kavli Institute for Astrophysics and Space Research. “If you want to understand TDEs as a whole and use them to probe supermassive black hole demographics, you need to look in the infrared band.”
Other MIT authors include Kishalay De, Christos Panagiotou, Anna-Christina Eilers, Danielle Frostig, and Robert Simcoe, and MIT assistant professor of physics Erin Kara, along with collaborators from multiple institutions including the Max Planck Institute for Extraterrestrial Physics in Germany.
Heat Spike
The team recently detected the closest TDE yet, by searching through infrared observations. The discovery opened a new, infrared-based route by which astronomers can search for actively feeding black holes.
That first detection spurred the group to comb for more TDEs. For their new study, the researchers searched through archival observations taken by NEOWISE — the renewed version of DOI: 10.3847/1538-4357/ad18bb
This research was supported, in part, by NASA.