AT2019 avd: A tidal disruption event with a two-phase evolution

Jin-Hong Chen, Li-Ming Dou, Rong-Feng Shen

Published 2021-06-16Version 1

Tidal disruption events (TDEs) can uncover the quiescent super-massive black holes (SMBHs) at the center of galaxies and also offer a promising method to study them. After the disruption of a star by a SMBH, the highly elliptical orbit of the debris stream will be gradually circularized due to the self-crossing, and then the circularized debris will form an accretion disk. The recent TDE candidate AT 2019avd has double peaks in its optical light curve, and the X-ray emerges near the second peak. The durations of the peaks are about 400 and 600 days, respectively, and the separation between them is ~ 700 days. We fit and analyse its spectral energy distribution (SED) in optical/UV, mid-infrared, and X-ray bands. We find that this source can be interpreted as the circularization process in the first phase plus the delayed accretion process in the second phase. Under this two-phase scenario, we use the succession of self-crossing circularization model to fit the first peak, and the delayed accretion model to fit the second peak. The fitting results are consistent with the partial disruption of a 0.9 M_sun star by a 7 * 10^6 M_sun SMBH with the penetration factor \beta ~ 0.6. Furthermore, we find the large-amplitude (by factors up to ~ 5) X-ray variability in AT 2019avd can be interpreted as the rigid-body precession of the misaligned disk due to the Lense-Thirring effect of a spinning SMBH, with the disk precession period of 10 - 25 days.