The Luminosity Function of Tidal Disruption Flares for the ZTF-I Survey

Abstract

The high-cadence survey of Zwicky Transient Facility (ZTF) has completely dominated the discovery of tidal disruption events (TDEs) in the past few years and resulted in the largest sample of TDEs with optical/UV light curves well-sampled around their peaks, providing us an excellent opportunity to construct a peak luminosity function (LF) of tidal disruption flares (TDFs). The new construction is necessary particularly considering that the most updated LF reported in literature has been inferred from only 13 sources from 5 different surveys. Here we present the optical and blackbody LFs calculated by 33 TDFs discovered in the ZTF-I survey. The optical LF can be described by both a power-law profile $dN/d{L}_g\propto L_g^{-2.3\pm 0.2}$, and a Schechter-like function. The blackbody LF can be described by a power-law profile $dN/d{L}_{\mathrm{bb}}\propto L_{\mathrm{bb}}^{-2.2\pm 0.2}$, shallower than the LF made of previous van Velzen (2018) sample. A possible low-luminosity turnover in the optical LF supports an Eddington-limited emission scenario. The drop of volumetric rate at high luminosity suggests a rate suppression due to direct captures of the black hole. The total volumetric rate is one order of magnitude lower than the previous estimation, which is probably not simply caused by the high fraction post-peak sources (7/13) in the previous sample. Instead, the normalization step during the previous LF construction to reconcile various surveys might adversely amplify the influence of serendipitous discoveries. Therefore, TDFs selected from ongoing and upcoming uniform surveys like ZTF, Vera Rubin Observatory (VRO) and Wide-Field Survey Telescope (WFST) should yield more accurate LFs.

13 pages, 3 figures, 2 tables, accepted for publication in ApJ Letters

References in corpus (12)

• The Zwicky Transient Facility: System Overview, Performance, and First Results
• The Zwicky Transient Facility: Data Processing, Products, and Archive
• Tidal Disruption Events
• The Zwicky Transient Facility: Surveys and Scheduler
• The Superluminous Transient ASASSN-15lh as a Tidal Disruption Event from a Kerr Black Hole
• Optical-Ultraviolet Tidal Disruption Events
• On the mass and luminosity functions of tidal disruption flares: rate suppression due to black hole event horizons
• Measurement of the rate of stellar tidal disruption flares
• Tidal disruption events from supermassive black hole binaries
• The Prospects of Finding Tidal Disruption Events with 2.5-Metre Wide-Field Survey Telescope (WFST) Based on Mock Observations
• On the impact of relativistic gravity on the rate of tidal disruption events
• Forward Modeling Populations of Flares from Tidal Disruptions of Stars by Super-massive Black Holes

Cited by in corpus (13)

• Generalized equipartition method from an arbitrary viewing angle
• AT 2020wey and the class of faint and fast Tidal Disruption Events
• Curious case of the maximum rigidity distribution of cosmic-ray accelerators
• Partial stellar tidal disruption events and their rates
• AT 2023clx: the Faintest and Closest Optical Tidal Disruption Event Discovered in Nearby Star-forming Galaxy NGC 3799
• AT2018dyk Revisited: a Tidal Disruption Event Candidate with Prominent Infrared Echo and Delayed X-ray Emission in a LINER Galaxy
• Demographics of Tidal Disruption Events with L-Galaxies: I. Volumetric TDE rates and the abundance of Nuclear Star Clusters
• The rate of extreme coronal line emitting galaxies in the Sloan Digital Sky Survey and their relation to tidal disruption events
• A Torus Remnant Revealed by the Infrared Echo of Tidal Disruption Event AT 2019qiz: Implications for the Missing Energy and Quasiperiodic Eruption Formation
• The luminosity function of TDEs from fallback-powered emission: implications for the black hole mass function
• Insights from the "Red devil" AT 2022fpx: A Dust-reddened Family of Tidal Disruption Events Excluded by Their Apparent Red Color?
• Early results in the search for extreme coronal line emitters with the Dark Energy Spectroscopic Instrument
• Discovery of a Featureless Tidal Disruption Event at z~1 with the Wide Field Survey Telescope