The On-axis Jetted Tidal Disruption Event AT2022cmc: X-ray Observations and Broadband Spectral Modeling

TL;DR

This study presents multi-epoch X-ray observations and broadband spectral modeling of the first on-axis jetted tidal disruption event (TDE) in a decade, revealing the jet's structure, emission regions, and Lorentz factor, with implications for relativistic jets.

Contribution

It provides the first detailed broadband spectral analysis of AT2022cmc, modeling its emission regions and jet properties, and challenges previous models by proposing a magnetically dominated jet with distinct emission zones.

Findings

X-ray spectra are well described by a broken power-law with a break at ~10 keV.

Radio and sub-millimeter emissions originate from external shocks at large distances.

X-ray emission is consistent with synchrotron radiation within the jet, with a Lorentz factor of 10--100.

Abstract

AT2022cmc was recently reported as the first on-axis jetted tidal disruption event (TDE) discovered in the last decade, and the fourth on-axis jetted TDE candidate known so far. In this work, we present NuSTAR hard X-ray (3--30 keV) observations of AT2022cmc, as well as soft X-ray (0.3--6 keV) observations obtained by NICER, Swift, and XMM-Newton. Our analysis reveals that the broadband X-ray spectra can be well described by a broken power-law with $f_\nu \propto \nu^{-0.5}$ ($f_\nu \propto \nu^{-1}$) below (above) the rest-frame break energy of $E_{\rm bk}\sim 10$ keV at observer-frame $t_{\rm obs}=7.8$ and 17.6 days since discovery. At $t_{\rm obs} = 36.2$ days, the X-ray spectrum is consistent with either a single power-law or a broken power-law. By modeling the spectral energy distribution evolution from radio to hard X-ray across the three NuSTAR observing epochs, we find that the sub-millimeter/radio emission originates from external shocks at large distances $\gtrsim\! 10^{17}$ cm from the black hole, the UV/optical light comes from a thermal envelope with radius $\sim\!10^{15}$ cm, and the X-ray emission is consistent with synchrotron radiation powered by energy dissipation at intermediate radii within the (likely magnetically dominated) jet. We constrain the bulk Lorentz factor of the jet to be of the order 10--100. Our interpretation differs from the model proposed by Pasham et al. (2023) where both the radio and X-rays come from the same emitting zone in a matter-dominated jet. Our model for the jet X-ray emission has broad implications on the nature of relativistic jets in other sources such as gamma-ray bursts.