Thermal electrons in the radio afterglow of relativistic tidal disruption event ZTF22aaajecp/AT2022cmc

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Thermal electrons in the radio afterglow of relativistic tidal disruption event ZTF22aaajecp/AT2022cmc

Authors

Lauren Rhodes, Ben Margalit, Joe S. Bright, Hannah Dykaar, Rob Fender, David A. Green, Daryl Haggard, Assaf Horesh, Alexander J. van der Horst, Andrew Hughes, Kunal Mooley, Itai Sfaradi, David Titterington, David WIlliams-Baldwin

Abstract

A tidal disruption event (TDE) occurs when a star travels too close to a supermassive black hole. In some cases, accretion of the disrupted material onto the black hole launches a relativistic jet. In this paper, we present a long term observing campaign to study the radio and sub-millimeter emission associated with the fifth jetted/relativistic TDE: AT2022cmc. Our campaign reveals a long lived counterpart. We fit three different models to our data: a non-thermal jet, a spherical outflow consisting of both thermal and non-thermal electrons, and a jet with thermal and non-thermal electrons. We find that the data is best described by a relativistic spherical outflow propagating into an environment with a density profile following R^-1.8. Comparison of AT2022cmc to other TDEs finds agreement in the density profile of the environment but also that AT2022cmc is twice as energetic as the other well-studied relativistic TDE Swift J1644. Our observations of AT2022cmc allow a thermal electron population to be inferred for the first time in a jetted transient providing, new insights into the microphysics of relativistic transients jets.

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