Today in ApJL, I led a paper describing the discovery of a Tidal Disruption Event (TDE) in the outskirts of a massive galaxy.
The TDE, named TDE 2025abcr, was discovered by the Zwicky Transient Facility (ZTF) and is located in the outskirts of a massive galaxy at a redshift of z=0.05. It was first identified by tdescore, a machine-learning classifier I developed to identify TDEs from photometric data.
The lightcurve resembled a typical TDE in other respects, but the location was unusual.
TDEs are typically found in the nuclei of galaxies, where a star can be disrupted by the central supermassive black hole. However, TDE 2025abcr was instead located in the outskirts of a massive galaxy, far from the nucleus. The source thus arose from a ‘wandering’ supermassive black hole, which was previously invisible to us.
The next step is to look for more of these off-nuclear TDEs, and build up a statistical sample so that we can study the demographics of wandering supermassive black holes.