Detection of Tidal Disruption Events around Direct Collapse Black Holes at High Redshifts with the James Webb Space Telescope

TL;DR

This paper explores the potential of JWST to detect Tidal Disruption Events around Direct Collapse Black Holes at high redshifts, highlighting observational signatures and detection challenges.

Contribution

It models the detectability of DCBH accretion and TDEs with JWST, providing new insights into their observational characteristics and distinguishing features.

Findings

DCBH accretion luminosities detectable up to z~7 with JWST

TDEs of massive stars can be observed as transients despite low event rates

TDEs around non-accreting black holes may be detected at z<7 in specific NIR bands

Abstract

This is the third sequel in a series discussing the discovery of various types of extragalactic transients with the {\it James Webb Space Telescope} in a narrow-field ($\sim 0.1$ deg$^2$), moderately deep ($m_{AB} \sim 27$ mag) survey. In this part we focus on the detectability and observational characteristics of Direct Collapse Black Holes (DCBH) and Tidal Disruption Events (TDE) around them. We use existing models for DCBH accretion luminosities and spectra as well as for TDE light curves, and find that accreting DCBH seeds may be bright enough for detection up to $z \sim 7$ with JWST NIRCam imaging, TDEs of massive ($M \gtrsim 50$ Msol) stars around them can enhance the chance for discovering them as transient objects, although the rates of such events is low, a few per survey time. TDEs around non-accreting black holes of $M \sim 10^6$ Msol may also be detected at $z < 7$ redshifts in the redder NIRCam bands between 3 and 5 microns. It is also shown that accreting DCBHs appear separate from supernovae (SNe) on the NIRCam color-color plot, but TDEs from quiescent black holes fall in nearly the same color range as Superluminous Supernovae (SLSNe), which makes them more difficult to identify.