An 85-s X-ray quasi-periodicity after a stellar tidal disruption by a candidate intermediate-mass black hole

IF 12.9 1区物理与天体物理 Q1 ASTRONOMY & ASTROPHYSICS

Nature Astronomy Pub Date : 2025-02-28 DOI:10.1038/s41550-025-02502-0

Wenjie Zhang, Xinwen Shu, Luming Sun, Rong-Feng Shen, Liming Dou, Ning Jiang, Tinggui Wang

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Abstract

It is still in dispute whether intermediate-mass black holes (IMBHs) with a mass of ~10³–10⁵ solar masses (M_⊙) exist, which are the missing link between stellar-mass black holes (5–50 M_⊙) and supermassive black holes (10⁶–10¹⁰ M_⊙). The bright flares from tidal disruption events (TDEs) provide a new and direct way to probe IMBHs. 3XMM J215022.4-055108 is a unique off-nuclear X-ray transient that can be best explained as the TDE by an IMBH in a massive star cluster, although its mass is not well determined. Here we report the discovery of a transient X-ray quasi-periodicity signal from 3XMM J215022.4-055108 with a period of ~85 s (at a significance of >3.51σ) and fractional root-mean-squared amplitude of ~10%. Furthermore, the signal is coherent with a quality factor of ~16. The significance drops to >3.13σ if considering all light curves with sufficient quality for quasi-periodic oscillation search. Combined with the results from X-ray continuum fittings, the detection of quasi-periodic oscillation allows joint constraints on the black hole mass and dimensionless spin in the range of 9.9 × 10³ to 1.6 × 10⁴ M_⊙ and 0.26 to 0.36, respectively. This result supports the presence of an IMBH in an off-nuclear massive star cluster and may allow the study of IMBHs through X-ray timing of TDEs.

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来源期刊

Nature Astronomy Physics and Astronomy-Astronomy and Astrophysics

CiteScore

19.50

自引率

2.80%

发文量

252

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