Discovery of a Featureless Tidal Disruption Event at z~1 with the Wide Field Survey Telescope

TL;DR

This paper reports the discovery of a high-redshift, featureless tidal disruption event (TDE) with unique spectral properties, providing insights into TDEs' intrinsic spectral energy distributions and their role in understanding supermassive black holes.

Contribution

The discovery of the highest-redshift non-jetted TDE with a featureless spectrum, offering new opportunities to study TDEs' UV emission and SMBH demographics.

Findings

TDE at z~1 exhibits a featureless blue continuum.

Blackbody temperature of ~19,000K with peak luminosity ~8.27×10^44 erg/s.

Host galaxy properties suggest a SMBH mass of ~10^8 M_sun.

Abstract

We report the discovery of tidal disruption event (TDE) WFST250820mmsw/AT2025wet by the 2.5-meter Wide Field Survey Telescope (WFST). It exhibits a blue nuclear flare throughout the observed evolution with a g-band peak magnitude ~22, which is about 3 magnitudes brighter than its host galaxy. A Keck/LRIS spectrum taken near the optical peak reveals a featureless blue continuum, with no discernible emission lines. However, its redshift can be accurately determined to be 1.037 by its host galaxy absorption lines. Blackbody fits to the multiband spectral energy distribution (SED) of AT2025wet yield a constant temperature of ~19,000K and a peak luminosity of (8.27 +0.92 -0.71)*10^44 erg s^-1 while actually the SED likely peaks at a much shorter wavelength than a 19,000K blackbody. The SED modeling of the host galaxy implies a stellar mass of ~10^11.2 M_odot and an estimated central black hole mass of ~10^8 M_odot, with no evidence of significant active galactic nucleus activity prior to the flare. All of these observations are well consistent with a featureless TDE scenario, making it the highest-redshift non-jetted TDE known to date. TDEs at such high redshift provide us a unique opportunity to explore the intrinsic SEDs of TDEs, particularly to test whether they peak in the extreme-UV regime, thereby addressing the missing energy puzzle and the origin of optical emission in TDEs. Ongoing surveys represented by WFST and the Legacy Survey of Space and Time (LSST) are expected to discover an increasing number of TDEs at higher redshifts, which will extend our census of SMBHs across redshift space and help unravel the mysteries of optical TDEs through direct probes of their UV emission.