Hyperluminous Supersoft X-Ray Sources in the Chandra Catalog

TL;DR

This paper reports a search for hyperluminous supersoft X-ray sources in the Chandra catalog, leading to the discovery of a new tidal disruption event potentially involving an intermediate-mass black hole, using innovative algorithms.

Contribution

It introduces a new algorithm and a machine-learning approach to efficiently identify hyperluminous supersoft X-ray sources in archival data.

Findings

Discovered a new tidal disruption event in Chandra data.

Identified a candidate event in 2001-2002, one of the first observed by Chandra.

Demonstrated the effectiveness of combined manual and machine-learning methods.

Abstract

Hyperluminous supersoft X-ray sources, such as bright extragalactic sources characterized by particularly soft X-ray spectra, offer a unique opportunity to study accretion onto supermassive black holes in extreme conditions. Examples of hyperluminous supersoft sources are tidal disruption events, systems exhibiting quasi-periodic eruptions, changing-look AGN, and anomalous nuclear transients. Although these objects are rare phenomena amongst the population of X-ray sources, we developed an efficient algorithm to identify promising candidates exploiting archival observations. In this work, we present the results of a search for hyperluminous supersoft X-ray sources in the recently released Chandra catalog of serendipitous X-ray sources. This archival search has been performed via both a manual implementation of the algorithm we developed and a novel machine-learning-based approach. This search identified a new tidal disruption event, which might have occurred in an intermediate-mass black hole. This event occurred between 2001 and 2002, making it one of the first tidal disruption events ever observed by Chandra.