11 papers
A Suppressed Volumetric Rate of High-Luminosity Mid-Infrared Selected Tidal Disruption Events
Prajna Nair, Christos Panagiotou, Megan Masterson +4
Tidal Disruption Events (TDEs) serve as direct probes of the population of supermassive black holes in the center of galaxies and are nowadays regularly detected in optical wide-fi…
Discovery of Quasar Variability and Early Accretion Disk Signatures at Cosmic Dawn
Gene C. K. Leung, Anna-Christina Eilers, Christos Panagiotou +12
In the nearby universe, quasars are well known to exhibit variability in their brightness over time, offering a powerful tool to probe the physics of accretion onto the SMBH and di…
Radial Velocity Evidence for a Post-Mass-Transfer Massive Binary System: NaSt1
Kittipong Wangnok, Samaporn Tinyanont, Ryan M. Lau +11
We present multi-epoch high-resolution optical spectroscopy () of the emission-line object NaSt1 to test its proposed binary nature, along with long-term multiba…
Ghosts of eruptions past: Searching for historical Galactic supernovae using variable thermal dust echoes and machine learning
Justin Vega, Kishalay De, Ashish Mahabal +4
The Galactic core-collapse supernova (SN) rate is estimated at per century; however, no optically visible SN has been discovered in the past 400 years. Although recor…
Testing the Association of Supermassive Black Hole Infrared Flares and High-energy Neutrinos
Megan Wang, Christos Panagiotou, Kishalay De +3
The physical origin of the observed cosmic neutrinos remains an open question and the subject of active research. While matter accretion onto supermassive black holes is long thoug…
AT2019cmw: A highly luminous, cooling featureless TDE candidate from the disruption of a high mass star in an early-type galaxy
Jacob L. Wise, Daniel A. Perley, Nikhil Sarin +23
We present optical/UV photometric and spectroscopic observations, as well as X-ray and radio follow-up, of the extraordinary event AT2019cmw. With a peak bolometric luminosity of ~…