Year: 2021
Type: article
Abstract: In November 2020, the Swift team announced an update to the UltraViolet and Optical Telescope calibration to correct for the loss of sensitivity over time. This correction affects observations in the three near-ultraviolet (UV) filters, by up to 0.3 mag in some cases. As UV photometry is critical to characterizing tidal disruption events (TDEs) and other peculiar nuclear outbursts, we recomputed published Swift data for TDEs and other singular nuclear outbursts with Swift photometry in 2015 or later as a service to the community. Using archival UV, optical, and infrared photometry, we ran host SED fits for each host galaxy. From these, we computed synthetic host magnitudes and host-galaxy properties. We calculated host-subtracted magnitudes for each transient and computed blackbody fits. In addition to the nuclear outbursts, we include the ambiguous transient ATLAS18qqn (AT2018cow), which has been classified as a potential TDE on an intermediate-mass black hole. Finally, with updated bolometric light curves, we recover the relationship of Hinkle et al., where more-luminous TDEs decay more slowly than less-luminous TDEs, with decreased scatter compared to the original relationship.
Source: The Astrophysical Journal
Language: English
Subfield: Astronomy and Astrophysics
Field: Physics and Astronomy
Domain: Physical Sciences
Open Access status: bronze
Awards: G1672945522, G229988569, G3431398970, Hawaii Supernova Flows, G433322167, WoU-MMA: Collaborative Research: All-Sky Automated Survey for -Supernovae in the Era of Multi-Messenger Astrophysics, G58316358, G5888866032, G6235576518, G6273510985, MRI: Development of a Robotic University of Hawaii 88" Telescope (Robo88): A new tool for large surveys, rapid transient classification, and multimessenger astronomy, G7061629469, G833983140
OpenAlex ID: W3131509182