Description
When a star passes close to massive black hole, it is tidally disrupted, yielding a bright transient that can be detected at optical wavelengths. Over the past decade, many of these Tidal Disruption Events (TDEs) have been discovered. A puzzling property of their host galaxies is the observation that most TDEs are found in the so-called green valley of the galaxy distribution. The nature of this rate enhancement is unknown. We investigated the origin of this enhancement using SDSS and Gaia data of nearby galaxies. By leveraging the high angular resolution of the Gaia data, we constructed a new compactness measurement of these galaxies and investigated how the compactness scales with other properties, such as morphology, color and absolute magnitude. This allows us to compare the compactness of known TDE host galaxies with a well-defined control sample with a similar mass, redshift and color. We found that TDE host galaxies are significantly more compact compared to this control sample. Our work suggests that a combination of the central stellar density and the recent star formation history can explain the host galaxy reference of TDEs.
| Talk category | NOVA Network 3 |
|---|---|
| Preference for a talk or poster | Poster |
