Supermassive black hole mass inference with the optical flares of tidal disruption events

TL;DR

This paper introduces a new method and software tool for estimating supermassive black hole masses using optical flare data from tidal disruption events, enabling rapid and reliable measurements.

Contribution

It develops an empirical relationship between optical/UV flare features and black hole mass, validated with a publicly available code, improving speed and accuracy of SMBH mass estimates from TDEs.

Findings

The method aligns with detailed disk models and galactic scaling laws.

It provides reliable mass estimates for partial and full disruptions.

No late-time data is needed for mass constraints.

Abstract

Tidal disruption events (TDEs) represent a truly unique, and potentially very powerful, probe of the quiescent supermassive black hole (SMBH) population. Given current observational survey capabilities the vast majority of the TDEs discovered in the next decade will be observed only across optical-UV wavelengths. A set of questions of broad scientific interest relating to SMBH demographics and SMBH-galaxy correlations could in principal be answered by using TDE emission as an efficient means to constrain SMBH masses. In this paper we argue for using well-understood elements of TDE emission (the thermal X-ray continuum and late-time UV plateau) to derive empirical relationships between the more poorly understood early optical/UV flare and the black hole mass, before using these empirical relationships to measure TDE black hole masses simply and rapidly. We provide a publicly available code TDEFLARE which does this, showing (i) it produces results consistent with disk codes containing far more physics, (ii) it reproduces galactic scaling relationships at high ($>5\sigma$) significance, (iii) it produces reliable mass estimates for both partial and full disruptions, and (iv) it does not require late time data to derive mass constraints. We provide 89 TDE black hole mass constraints, derive the intrinsic black hole mass function implied by the current TDE population, and discuss the Malmquist-Hills bias, an important confounding factor in TDE science.