The rate of extreme coronal line emitting galaxies in the Sloan Digital Sky Survey and their relation to tidal disruption events

Abstract

High-ionization iron coronal lines (CLs) are a rare phenomenon observed in galaxy and quasi-stellar object spectra that are thought to be created by high-energy emission from active galactic nuclei and certain types of transients. In cases known as extreme coronal line emitting galaxies (ECLEs), these CLs are strong and fade away on a timescale of years. The most likely progenitors of these variable CLs are tidal disruption events (TDEs), which produce sufficient high-energy emission to create and sustain the CLs over these timescales. To test the possible connection between ECLEs and TDEs, we present the most complete variable ECLE rate calculation to date and compare the results to TDE rates from the literature. To achieve this, we search for ECLEs in the Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS). We detect sufficiently strong CLs in 16 galaxies, more than doubling the number previously found in SDSS. We find that none of the nine new ECLEs evolve in a manner consistent with that of the five previously discovered variable ECLEs. Using this sample of five variable ECLEs, we calculate the galaxy-normalized rate of variable ECLEs in SDSS to be $R_{\mathrm{G}}=3.6{}_{-1.8}^{+2.6}(\mathrm{statistical}){}_{-0.0}^{+5.1}(\mathrm{systematic})\times 10^{-6}{\mathrm{galaxy}}^{-1}{\mathrm{yr}}^{-1}$. The mass-normalised rate is $R_{\mathrm{M}}=3.1{}_{-1.5}^{+2.3}(\mathrm{statistical}){}_{-0.0}^{+4.4}(\mathrm{systematic})\times 10^{-17}{\mathrm{M}}_{\odot }^{-1}{\mathrm{yr}}^{-1}$ and the volumetric rate is $R_{\mathrm{V}}=7{}_{-5}^{+20}(\mathrm{statistical}){}_{-0.0}^{+10}(\mathrm{systematic})\times 10^{-9}{\mathrm{Mpc}}^{-3}{\mathrm{yr}}^{-1}$. Our rates are one to two orders of magnitude lower than TDE rates from the literature, which suggests that only 10 to 40 per cent of all TDEs produce variable ECLEs. Additional uncertainties in the rates arising from the structure of the interstellar medium have yet to be included.

29 pages, 14 figures. Accepted by MNRAS

References in corpus (51)

• The 2.5 m Telescope of the Sloan Digital Sky Survey
• The Host Galaxies and Classification of Active Galactic Nuclei
• The Zwicky Transient Facility: System Overview, Performance, and First Results
• The Sixteenth Data Release of the Sloan Digital Sky Surveys: First Release from the APOGEE-2 Southern Survey and Full Release of eBOSS Spectra
• Initial Performance of the NEOWISE Reactivation Mission
• Intermediate-Mass Black Holes
• A Continuum of H- to He-Rich Tidal Disruption Candidates With a Preference for E+A Galaxies
• Overview of the Instrumentation for the Dark Energy Spectroscopic Instrument
• Tidal Disruption Events
• Seventeen Tidal Disruption Events from the First Half of ZTF Survey Observations: Entering a New Era of Population Studies
• Full spectrum fitting with photometry in pPXF: stellar population versus dynamical masses, non-parametric star formation history and metallicity for 3200 LEGA-C galaxies at redshift z~0.8
• SN 2005ap: A Most Brilliant Explosion
• DESI Bright Galaxy Survey: Final Target Selection, Design, and Validation
• A tidal disruption event coincident with a high-energy neutrino
• UV/Optical Detections of Candidate Tidal Disruption Events by GALEX and CFHTLS
• The Spectroscopic Data Processing Pipeline for the Dark Energy Spectroscopic Instrument
• Reverberation mapping of Active Galactic Nuclei: from X-ray corona to dusty torus
• The Final Season Reimagined: 30 Tidal Disruption Events from the ZTF-I Survey
• Radio Properties of Tidal Disruption Events
• Optical-Ultraviolet Tidal Disruption Events
• Evolution of tidal disruption candidates discovered by XMM-Newton
• On the mass and luminosity functions of tidal disruption flares: rate suppression due to black hole event horizons
• Correcting for Telluric Absorption: Methods, Case Studies, and Release of the TelFit Code
• Measurement of the rate of stellar tidal disruption flares
• Candidate tidal disruption events from the XMM-Newton Slew Survey
• Rates of Stellar Tidal Disruption
• A Tidal Disruption Flare in Abell 1689 from an Archival X-ray Survey of Galaxy Clusters
• A New Paradigm for Gamma Ray Bursts: Long Term Accretion Rate Modulation by an External Accretion Disk
• Measuring stellar and black hole masses of tidal disruption events
• NTT, Spitzer and Chandra spectroscopy of SDSSJ095209.56+214313.3: the most luminous coronal-line supernova ever observed, or a stellar tidal disruption event ?
• Mid-InfraRed Outburst in Nearby Galaxies (MIRONG) I: Sample Selection and Characterization
• The Tidal Disruption Event AT 2018hyz I: Double-peaked emission lines and a flat Balmer decrement
• Endurance of SN 2005ip after a decade: X-rays, radio, and H-alpha like SN 1988Z require long-lived pre-supernova mass loss
• To TDE or not to TDE: The luminous transient ASASSN-18jd with TDE-like and AGN-like qualities
• X-ray properties of TDEs
• The Automated Photometry Of Transients (AutoPhOT) pipeline
• Reverberation in tidal disruption events: dust echoes, coronal emission lines, multi-wavelength cross-correlations, and QPOs
• Jets from Tidal Disruption Events
• Stellar tidal disruption candidates found by cross-correlating the ROSAT Bright Source Catalogue and XMM-Newton observations
• Delayed Appearance and Evolution of Coronal Lines in the TDE AT2019qiz
• The nuclear transient AT 2017gge: a tidal disruption event in a dusty and gas-rich environment and the awakening of a dormant SMBH
• The Luminosity Function of Tidal Disruption Flares for the ZTF-I Survey
• Discovery of ATLAS17jrp as an Optical, X-ray and Infrared Bright TDE in a Star-forming Galaxy
• Mid-InfraRed Outbursts in Nearby Galaxies (MIRONG). II. Optical Spectroscopic Follow-up
• The Black Hole Mass of NGC 4151 from Stellar Dynamical Modeling
• Long-term follow-up observations of extreme coronal line emitting galaxies
• Cosmic rate of type IIn supernovae and its evolution with redshift
• Extreme Accretion Events: TDEs and Changing-Look AGN
• Mid-Infrared Outbursts in Nearby Galaxies: Nuclear Obscuration and Connections to Hidden Tidal Disruption Events and Changing-Look Active Galactic Nuclei
• The rate of extreme coronal line emitting galaxies in the Sloan Digital Sky Survey and their relation to tidal disruption events
• AT2021acak: a candidate tidal disruption event found in the Zwicky Transient Facility survey

Cited by in corpus (5)

• The rate of extreme coronal line emitting galaxies in the Sloan Digital Sky Survey and their relation to tidal disruption events
• AT 2018dyk: tidal disruption event or active galactic nucleus? Follow-up observations of an extreme coronal line emitter with the Dark Energy Spectroscopic Instrument
• eROSITA-RU Tidal Disruption Events with Keck-I/LRIS: Sample Selection, Optical Properties, and Host Galaxy Demographics
• Mid-Infrared Variability in Nearby Galaxies from the MaNGA Sample
• Early results in the search for extreme coronal line emitters with the Dark Energy Spectroscopic Instrument