Rapid late-time X-ray brightening of the tidal disruption event OGLE16aaa

Understand

Stars that pass too close to a super-massive black hole may be disrupted by strong tidal forces.

• OGLE16aaa is one such tidal disruption event (TDE) which rapidly brightened and peaked in the optical/UV bands in early 2016 and subsequently decayed over the rest of the year.
• OGLE16aaa was detected in an XMM-Newton X-ray observation on June 9, 2016 with a flux slightly below the Swift/XRT upper limits obtained during the optical light curve peak.
• Between June 16-21, 2016, Swift/XRT also detected OGLE16aaa and based on the stacked spectrum, we could infer that the X-ray luminosity had jumped up by more than a factor of ten in just one week.