Friday, February 28, 2025 at 12:15 pm

JILA Foothills Room

Will Golay, Harvard CFA

"The First Directly Resolved Non-Relativistic Outflow from a Tidal Disruption Event"

Abstract:

In this seminar, I will share preliminary results of detailed radio observations of the mid-infrared discovered tidal disruption event (TDE) WTP14adeqka. Using the Very Long Baseline Array, we have directly resolved the outflow from a non-relativistic TDE for the first time. We also collected multi-frequency Very Large Array observations to characterize the spectral energy distribution and infer the outflow properties for comparison with the VLBA-resolved size. The radio flare from WTP14adeqka was first detected ~2 years after the mid-infrared discovery and peaked approximately 2 years later, reminiscent of the delayed radio outflows recently identified in a considerable fraction of the optically discovered TDE population. We excluded the possibility of pre-transient active galactic nucleus activity by characterizing the host galaxy’s optical spectrum. The outflow has energetics typical for non-relativistic TDEs, determined via an equipartition analysis of the SED, and our VLBA observation independently confirmed the size ∼0.1 pc. We argue these observations strongly disfavor the off-axis jet scenario for WTP14adeqka and thus identify the first example of a resolved non-relativistic outflow from a TDE.

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