X-ray Spectral-Timing Properties of Tidal Disruption Events

TL;DR

This study systematically analyzes the X-ray variability of 18 tidal disruption events (TDEs) on minute-to-hour timescales, revealing differences in spectral and timing properties between thermal and nonthermal states, and comparing them to X-ray binaries and AGN.

Contribution

It provides the first comprehensive spectral-timing analysis of TDEs, highlighting state-dependent variability and differences from AGN coronae using Fourier methods.

Findings

TDEs with coronae are more X-ray variable and have steeper PSDs.

Variability amplitude increases with photon energy in thermal TDEs.

Coronal properties in TDEs differ from those in long-lived AGN.

Abstract

We perform the first systematic study of the minute-to-hours-timescale stochastic variability observed in the X-ray luminosity of tidal disruption events (TDEs) using XMM-Newton data and Fourier analysis methods. We measure the spectral properties, power spectral densities (PSDs), fractional variability amplitudes, and energy dependence of the variability for 18 TDEs spanning 54 observations, of which 27 occur in thermal disk-dominated states and 27 show a nonthermal hard X-ray corona. Compared to pure thermal sources, we find TDEs with coronae are more X-ray variable and show steeper PSDs indicating longer correlation timescales. This state-transition behavior is qualitatively similar to X-ray binaries, which show higher fractional variability in the hard state than in the soft state. However, newborn TDE coronae show systematically flatter PSDs and softer energy spectra than their long-lived AGN counterparts. We also show that the variability amplitude of thermal TDEs increases with photon energy, consistent with variations sourced by local temperature fluctuations and exponentially enhanced in the Wien tail. Our work demonstrates that combining spectral and timing properties of X-ray TDEs can probe the microphysics of newly formed accretion flows around supermassive black holes, and that the coronae formed in TDEs fundamentally differ from those in AGN.