Demographics of Wandering Black Holes Powering Off-Nuclear Tidal Disruption Events

Abstract

The recent discovery of three off-nuclear tidal disruption events (EP240222a, AT2024tvd, and AT2025abcr) - following the first such source, 3XMM J2150$-$05 - reveals a small but robust population of off-nuclear, or `wandering', black holes (WBHs) with masses $M_{\bullet }>10^4{M}_{\odot }$. Two demographic trends are already apparent: (i) all events occur in massive, early-type parent galaxies with stellar masses $10.8\lesssim {\log }_{10}(M_{\star }/M_{\odot })\lesssim 11.1$; and (ii) events at larger halo-centric radii ($R_{\mathrm{TDE}}/R_{200}$) are associated with dwarf satellites ($M_{\star }\sim 10^7{M}_{\odot }$), while those closer to halo centers lack detected stellar counterparts. Using results from the \texttt{ROMULUS} cosmological simulation, we show that both trends naturally arise from hierarchical galaxy formation. By combining the simulation with empirical constraints on the local galaxy population, we compute the volumetric density of WBHs, ${\varphi }_{\mathrm{WBH}}(M_{\star })$, finding that it peaks at ${\log }_{10}(M_{\star }/M_{\odot })=11.10_{-0.10}^{+0.05}$ and that more than half of all WBHs in the local Universe reside in galaxies with $10.7\lesssim {\log }_{10}(M_{\star }/M_{\odot })\lesssim 11.2$, explaining (i) and predicting its persistence as the sample grows. We further show that ii), i.e., the observed link between detection of stellar counterparts and $R_{\mathrm{TDE}}/R_{200}$, is also expected from tidal stripping. These results demonstrate that off-nuclear TDEs are powered by the population of WBHs long predicted by cosmological simulations.

Submitted to ApJ Letters