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Mon. Not. R. Astron. Soc. 000, 000000 (0000) Printed 9 April 2013 (MN L
A
T
E
X style le v2.2)
Multi-wavelength Observations of the Giant X-ray Flare Galaxy
NGC 5905 : signatures of tidal disruption
H.Raichur
1
, M.Das
2
, A.Alonso Herrero
3
, P.Shastri
2
, N.G.Kantharia
4
1. Raman Research Institute, Bangalore, India.
2. Indian Institute of Astrophysics, Koramangala, Bangalore 560034, India.
3. Instituto de Fisica de Cantabria, CSIC-UC, Avenida de los Castros S/N, ES 39005 Santander, Spain.
4. National Centre of Radio Astrophysics, TIFR, Pune, India.
Accepted.....; Received .....
ABSTRACT
NGC 5905 is one of the few galaxies in which an X-ray are was discovered by the ROSAT
All Sky Survey (RASS). This are was supposed to have occurred due to tidal disruption of a
star by the central black hole. In this work we present analysis of multi-wavelength follow-up
observations made in X-ray, mid-infrared and radio using data obtained from the Chandra
X-ray observatory, Spitzer and Giant Meter wave Radio telescope (GMRT) respectively. The
archival Chandra 2007 observations show that the X-ray luminosity in the energy band of 0.5-
2.0 keV has decreased by a factor of 200 since the peak of the X-ray are observed in 1990.
The X-ray image reveals no centrally bright core expected in the presence of an AGN. Diuse
X-ray emission lying close to the circum-nuclear star forming ring is observed. The radio ux
density observed with the GMRT data is similar to the ux density derived using the VLA
FIRST observation in 1997 which indicates that the radio emission is probably unaected by
the 1990 X-ray are. The archival Spitzer 2006 mid-infrared spectrum shows strong evidence
of nuclear star formation but does not show any clear signatures of AGN activity. Therefore,
we conclude, that there is no central AGN in NGC 5905 and rearm that the 1990 X-ray
are observed in this galaxy was a tidal disruption event and not due to AGN variability.
NGC 5905 represents one of the few direct evidences that non-accreting black holes exist and
hence provides an opportunity to study the post-outburst evolution of a tidal disruption event
in the nucleus of a giant low surface brightness galaxy.
Key words: Galaxies:spiral - Galaxies:individual (NGC 5905) - Galaxies:nuclei -
Galaxies:X-ray - Galaxies:active - X-rays - radio continuum - infrared radiation.
1 INTRODUCTION
NGC 5905 is a barred spiral galaxy (SB(r)b type) at a distance of
47.8 Mpc (z=0.011 and H
0
=73 km s
1
pc
1
). It is classied as a
giant low surface brightness (GLSB) galaxy because of its low sur-
face brightness disk (Kent 1985; Sprayberry et al. 1995). Like most
GLSB galaxies, the HI disk is very extended and relatively poor
in star formation (van Moorsel 1982) even though it is interacting
with the nearby galaxy NGC 5908. This interaction has resulted
in the formation of extended spiral arms and a bar in the galaxy
center. This galaxy also has a relatively bright bulge and shows nu-
clear star formation. Optical observations in H of the nucleus of
this galaxy reveal a circum-nuclear ring of star formation of 1 kpc
in diameter (Mazzuca et al. 2008; Comeron et al. 2010).
Active Galactic Nuclear (AGN) activity in late type galaxies
such as GLSB galaxies, is relatively weak in comparison to the
activity observed in other early-type galaxies (Ho 2008). Recent
studies of large LSB galaxies suggest that they lie below the M-
correlation for bright galaxies (Pizzella et al. 2005). X-ray observa-
tions reveal that these galaxies do not follow the usual radioX-ray
correlation (Das et al. 2009) and indicate that probably the central
black hole (BH) masses of these system are lower than the masses
of their counterpart in other normal galaxies (Ramya et al. 2011;
Naik et al. 2010). The lower mass of the central BH is probably due
to the fact that there is not enough gas infall towards the nuclear
regions of these galaxies to fuel the growth of the super massive
black hole (SMBH, Norman & Silk 1983). Gas infall is triggered
by disk perturbations such as bars and spiral arms but these fea-
tures are dicult to form in LSB galaxies because of their massive
dark matter halos (Mayer & Wadsley 2004; Kuzio de Naray et al.
2008; Walker et al. 2010).
ROSAT All-sky survey (RASS) discovered an X-ray are in
NGC 5905 in 1990. During the X-ray are the soft X-ray lumi-
nosity reached a peak of L
X
6 10
41
ergs s
1
(assuming an
absorbed powerlaw spectral model with N
H
= 1.5 10
20
cm
2
,
a power law index of 4 and distance 47.8 pc) and decreased be-
low 9 10
40
ergs s
1
within 5 months of the X-ray outburst
(Bade et al. 1996). Very few cases of X-ray outbursts of variabil-
ity amplitude greater than 80 have been observed (Donley et al.
c 0000 RAS
2 Raichur et al.
Table 1. Details of Observational Data
Wave- Instrument Date of Observation Exposure
length time
X-ray ACIS-S 2002-10-04 00:47:57 9.980 ks
2007-06-07 09:26:01 44.95 ks
2007-06-09 01:50:39 26.95 ks
Radio GMRT 1278 Hz June 2011 2 hours
VLA FIRST May 1997 ....
VLA 8 GHz (archive) November 1996 45 min
IR Spitzer/IRS 2006-01-16 13:46:48 SH 30s 2 cycles
LH 60s 2 cycles
2002; Esquej et al. 2007; Saxton et al. 2012a; Maksym et al. 2010).
Follow-up X-ray observations using ROSAT and Chandra show
that the X-ray luminosity of the galaxy declined as L
x
t
5/3
,
as expected in the event of tidal disruption of a star near the cen-
tral BH (Rees 1988; Komossa & Bade 1999; Halpern et al. 2004).
Using the stellar velocity dispersion in the bulge of NGC 5905
( = 174.6 9.0km/s Ho et al. 2009) and the M
BH
calibra-
tion (G ultekin et al. 2009), the calculated mass of the nuclear BH in
NGC 5905 is M
BH
10
7
M
> 2
b
Reduced
2
is greater than 2 and hence no uncertainties on the tted parameters can be calculated
10
6
10
5
k
e
V
2
(
P
h
o
t
o
n
s
c
m
2
s
1
k
e
V
1
)
1 0.5 2
2
1
0
1
2
Energy (keV)
Figure 3. The X-ray spectrum of NGC 5905 extracted from the region
marked in gure 2 along with the best-t model (black curve) and the
residuals (lower panel). The model consists of an absorbed powerlaw (red
curve) and a blackbody (blue curve) component. See Table 2 for the model
details.
The spectrum of NGC 5905 is extracted from a circular re-
gion of 3.5 radius, shown in Figure 2. We extracted the spectra
and responses separately for the two pointings and then co-added
them to get a nal combined spectrum. Corresponding background
spectra were extracted from a source free region on the CCDs. The
spectra and corresponding responses were extracted using the task
specextract and coadded using the task combine spectra. We
grouped the combined spectrum such that each energy bin has 15
counts. Figure 3 shows the spectrum of NGC 5905 with the best t
model.
To derive the diuse emission in NGC 5905 we used the
eld of view of CCD-Id: 7 and included only events in the en-
ergy band of 0.5-7.0 keV. First, sources in the eld of view were
detected using wavedetect and then separate source and back-
ground region les for the detected sources were created using
roi and splitroi. The source count rates were replaced by cor-
responding background counts for each source region and an im-
age for each pointing was created by dmfilth. Images and expo-
sure maps, thus created for each pointing, were combined using the
tasks reproject image grid and reproject image. The com-
bined diuse emission image was rst exposure-corrected and then
divided by the exposure map to produce the required ux image.
We detected weak, diuse emission near the nucleus of NGC 5905.
The peak emission has a value approximately 14 times the back-
ground emission and this emission lies close to the circumnuclear
ring of star formation, as shown in Figure 4, where the contours
of the diuse emission are overlaid on the H image which is
obtained from the Atlas of Images of NUclear Rings (AINUR,
Comeron et al. 2010).
2.2 Radio observations
NGC 5905 was observed during June 2011 in radio continuum
at 1280 Hz using the Giant Metrewave Radio Telescope (GMRT)
c 0000 RAS, MNRAS 000, 000000
4 Raichur et al.
Figure 4. The H map taken from the AINUR atlas is plotted in gray
scale. Overlaid on this map are the contours of the X-ray diuse emission
smoothed over 4 pixels. The contours are 5 to 11 times the noise level in
steps of 1.
Figure 5. The gure shows the contours of radio continuum emission
at 1280 Hz overlaid on the 3.6 micron IRAC near-infrared image of the
galaxy. The contours are 5,10,15,20 and 25 times the noise level, which is
0.12 mJy/beam. The beam is elliptical and is 5.38
2.21
; it is shown in
the bottom left corner. The radio emission is concentrated about the nucleus
within the small but bright bulge in the galaxy.
located near Pune, India (Ananthakrishnan & Pramesh Rao 2001).
Nearby radio sources, 1438+621 and 3C 286, were used for phase
and ux calibrations respectively. NGC 5905 was part of a larger
survey of LSB galaxies and hence had a two hour scan. The data
was obtained in the native lta format, converted to FITS for-
mat and then analyzed using AIPS
2
. We obtained the 8 GHz radio
data from the VLA archive. These observations were done during
November, 1996. For this data, 1331+305 and 1510+570 were used
as ux and phase calibrators respectively. The 1.4 GHz image that
we have used was taken from VLA FIRST
3
; observations made
during May, 1997. See Table 1 for more details.
We analyzed the radio continuum emission from NGC 5905
at the frequencies 8 GHz and 1280 Hz. For frequency 1435 Hz, we
used the FIRST image. The 8 GHz VLA archival data was analyzed
using AIPS but no source was detected and hence dierent resolu-
tion maps were not made. These observations were also analysed
earlier (Komossa & Dahlem 2001) and a similar non-detection was
obtained.
The GMRT 1280 GHz radio data was iteratively edited and
calibrated until satisfactory gain solutions were obtained using
standard tasks in AIPS. NGC 5905 was imaged used IMAGR; we
made low resolution (robust 5) and high resolution (robust 0) maps.
However, since our aim was to compare our GMRT ux density
with the FIRST image (which has a beam of 5.4
5.4
), we -
nally used the GMRT robust 0 map whose beam is similar and has
a size of 5.38
2.21
.6 for SH
and 9
yr
1
, in good
agreement with the estimate of Mazzuca et al. (2008) using H
observations. Using the correlations between SFR and the soft X-
ray luminosity of Pereira-Santaella et al. (2011) we get an expected
0.5-2.0 keV X-ray luminosity of 4 10
39
erg s
1
consistent with
the measured X-ray luminosity (see Table 2) leaving no excess X-
ray emission which can be associated with a central Seyfert 2 type
AGN.
The absence of radio emission in the 8 GHz VLA radio map
also points to the absence of an AGN. The ux density of radio
emission from AGNs does not fall as sharply with increasing fre-
quency as star forming regions (Condon 1992). Hence if the com-
pact radio core was due to an AGN, we would have observed some
emission at 8 GHz as well.
Gezari et al. (2003) observed NGC 5905 in the optical using
the HST/STIS which has a narrow slit size of 0