Breakthrough Listen

Abstract:

In the past two decades, high-amplitude electromagnetic outbursts have been detected from dormant galaxies and often attributed to the tidal disruption of a star by the central black hole1,2. X-ray emission from the Seyfert 2 galaxy GSN 069 (2MASX J01190869-3411305) at a redshift of z = 0.018 was first detected in July 2010 and implies an X-ray brightening by a factor of more than 240 over ROSAT observations performed 16 years earlier3,4. The emission has smoothly decayed over time since 2010, possibly indicating a long-lived tidal disruption event5. The X-ray spectrum is ultra-soft and can be described by accretion disk emission with luminosity proportional to the fourth power of the disk temperature during long-term evolution. Here we report observations of quasi-periodic X-ray eruptions from the nucleus of GSN 069 over the course of 54 days, from December 2018 onwards. During these eruptions, the X-ray count rate increases by up to two orders of magnitude with an event duration of just over an hour and a recurrence time of about nine hours. These eruptions are associated with fast spectral transitions between a cold and a warm phase in the accretion flow around a low-mass black hole (of approximately 4 × 105 solar masses) with peak X-ray luminosity of about 5 × 1042 erg per second. The warm phase has kT (where T is the temperature and k is the Boltzmann constant) of about 120 electronvolts, reminiscent of the typical soft-X-ray excess, an almost universal thermal-like feature in the X-ray spectra of luminous active nuclei6,7,8. If the observed properties are not unique to GSN 069, and assuming standard scaling of timescales with black hole mass and accretion properties, typical active galactic nuclei with higher-mass black holes can be expected to exhibit high-amplitude optical to X-ray variability on timescales as short as months or years9.

Abstract:

We have observed the G23 field of the Galaxy AndMass Assembly (GAMA) survey using the Australian Square Kilometre Array Pathfinder (ASKAP) in its commissioning phase to validate the performance of the telescope and to characterise the detected galaxy populations. This observation covers ∼48 deg2 with synthesised beam of 32.7 arcsec by 17.8 arcsec at 936MHz, and ∼39 deg2 with synthesised beam of 15.8 arcsec by 12.0 arcsec at 1320MHz. At both frequencies, the root-mean-square (r.m.s.) noise is ∼0.1 mJy/beam. We combine these radio observations with the GAMA galaxy data, which includes spectroscopy of galaxies that are i-band selected with a magnitude limit of 19.2. Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer (WISE) infrared (IR) photometry is used to determine which galaxies host an active galactic nucleus (AGN). In properties including source counts, mass distributions, and IR versus radio luminosity relation, the ASKAP-detected radio sources behave as expected. Radio galaxies have higher stellar mass and luminosity in IR, optical, and UV than other galaxies. We apply optical and IR AGN diagnostics and find that they disagree for ∼30% of the galaxies in our sample. We suggest possible causes for the disagreement. Some cases can be explained by optical extinction of the AGN, but for more than half of the cases we do not find a clear explanation. Radio sources aremore likely (∼6%) to have an AGN than radio quiet galaxies (∼1%), but the majority of AGN are not detected in radio at this sensitivity.

Abstract:

In the current era of radio astronomy, continuum surveys observe a multitude of objects with complex morphologies and sizes, and are not limited to observing point sources. Typical radio source extraction software generates catalogues by using Gaussian components to form a model of the emission. This may not be well suited to complicated jet structures and extended emission, particularly in the era of interferometers with a high density of short baselines, which are sensitive to extended emission. In this paper, we investigate how the optically motivated source detection package ProFound (Robotham et al. 2018) may be used to model radio emission of both complicated and point-like radio sources. We use a combination of observations and simulations to investigate how ProFound compares to other source extractor packages used for radio surveys. We find that ProFound can accurately recover both the flux densities of simulated Gaussian sources as well as extended radio galaxies. ProFound can create models that trace the complicated nature of these extended galaxies, which we show is not necessarily the case with other source extraction software. Our work suggests that our knowledge of the emission from extended radio objects may be both over or under-estimated using traditional software. We suggest that ProFound offers a useful alternative to the fitting of Gaussian components for generating catalogues from current and future radio surveys. Furthermore, ProFound's multiwavelength capabilities will be useful in investigating radio sources in combination with multiwavelength data.