TDE 2025abcr: A Tidal Disruption Event in the Outskirts of a Massive Galaxy

Abstract

Tidal disruption events (TDEs) have traditionally been discovered in optical sky surveys through targeted searches of nuclear transients. However, it is expected that some TDEs will occur outside the galaxy nucleus, arising from wandering black holes originating in galaxy mergers. Here we present observations of TDE 2025abcr, the first optical TDE discovered in the outskirts of a host galaxy. The TDE was identified by a custom 'off-nuclear' implementation of the ML classifier $\text{tdescore}$, which classifies new ZTF transients based on their lightcurves. Follow-up observations confirm that TDE 2025abcr is a TDE-H+He, occurring 9.5$"$ (9.3 kpc projected distance) from the nucleus of a massive galaxy (${\mathrm{M}}_{\star }$ = $10^{11.18\pm 0.03}{\mathrm{M}}_{\odot }$) with a central black hole mass of $10^{8.82\pm 0.65}{\mathrm{M}}_{\odot }$. TDE 2025abcr itself was likely disrupted by a much lighter black hole ($10^{6.09\pm 0.53}{\mathrm{M}}_{\odot }$, as estimated with peak luminosity scaling relations). The black hole was either dynamically ejected from the nucleus or lies at the center of a very faint tidally-stripped dwarf galaxy undergoing a minor merger. Late-time observations of TDE 2025abcr could confirm the origin of this apparent 'wandering' black hole. The rate of highly offset ($\gtrsim$3 kpc) TDEs can be constrained to $<$10% of the nuclear TDE rate, but our discovery implies that many dozens of similar sources will be detected by the Vera C. Rubin each year with resolvable offsets.

accepted, 30 pages, 14 figures

References in corpus (46)

• The Zwicky Transient Facility: System Overview, Performance, and First Results
• HI4PI: A full-sky HI survey based on EBHIS and GASS
• The Zwicky Transient Facility: Data Processing, Products, and Archive
• Gaia Early Data Release 3: The astrometric solution
• CASA, the Common Astronomy Software Applications for Radio Astronomy
• The Zwicky Transient Facility: Science Objectives
• Intermediate-Mass Black Holes
• Stellar Population Inference with Prospector
• UV-extended E-MILES stellar population models: young components in massive early-type galaxies
• Large Merger Recoils and Spin Flips From Generic Black-Hole Binaries
• Determining the Type, Redshift, and Age of a Supernova Spectrum
• The Evolution of Galaxy Structure over Cosmic Time
• Tidal Disruption Events
• Nuclear Star Clusters
• Seventeen Tidal Disruption Events from the First Half of ZTF Survey Observations: Entering a New Era of Population Studies
• A Wolf-Rayet-like progenitor of supernova SN 2013cu from spectral observations of a wind
• The Zwicky Transient Facility: Observing System
• 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
• The Zwicky Transient Facility Bright Transient Survey. II. A Public Statistical Sample for Exploring Supernova Demographics
• A tidal disruption event coincident with a high-energy neutrino
• The VISTA Science Archive
• The Final Season Reimagined: 30 Tidal Disruption Events from the ZTF-I Survey
• Dynamics of triple black hole systems in hierarchically merging massive galaxies
• A large fraction of hydrogen-rich supernova progenitors experience elevated mass loss shortly prior to explosion
• A Fully Automated Integral Field Spectrograph Pipeline for the SEDMachine: pysedm
• The Einstein Probe Mission
• Early Emission from the Type IIn Supernova 1998S at High Resolution
• A data science platform to enable time-domain astronomy
• Delayed Radio Flares from a Tidal Disruption Event
• Fundamental scaling relationships revealed in the optical light curves of tidal disruption events
• Origins and Demographics of Wandering Black Holes
• New Modules for the SEDMachine to Remove Contaminations from Cosmic Rays and Non-target Light: BYECR and CONTSEP
• Image Subtraction in Fourier Space
• Multiwavelength Follow-up of the Hyperluminous Intermediate-mass Black Hole Candidate 3XMM J215022.4-055108
• A Late-Time Radio Flare following a Possible Transition in Accretion State in the Tidal Disruption Event AT 2019azh
• Unveiling the Population of Wandering Black Holes via Electromagnetic Signatures
• Lithium pollution of a white dwarf records the accretion of an extrasolar planetesimal
• Identifying Tidal Disruption Events with an Expansion of the FLEET Machine Learning Algorithm
• Deep Spectroscopy of the $M_V\sim -14.8$ Host Galaxy of a Tidal Disruption Flare in A1795
• The population of tidal disruption events discovered with eROSITA
• Minutes-duration Optical Flares with Supernova Luminosities
• The curious case of EP241021a: Unraveling the mystery of its exceptional rebrightening
• $\text{tdescore}$: An Accurate Photometric Classifier for Tidal Disruption Events
• Early Identification of Optical Tidal Disruption Events: A science module for the Fink broker
• eROSITA-RU Tidal Disruption Events with Keck-I/LRIS: Sample Selection, Optical Properties, and Host Galaxy Demographics
• A Photometric Classifier for Tidal Disruption Events in Rubin LSST

Cited by in corpus (1)

• Tracing black hole and galaxy growth across environments since cosmic noon