Rapid Dimming Followed by a State Transition: A Study of the Highly Variable Nuclear Transient AT 2019avd over 1000+ Days

Wang Yanan;Pasham;Dheeraj R.;Altamirano Diego;G'urpide Andr'es;Castro Segura;Noel Middleton;Matthew Ji;Long;del Palacio;Santiago Guolo;Muryel Gandhi;Poshak Zhang;Shuang-Nan Remillard;Ronald Lin;Dacheng Masterson;Megan Baldi;Ranieri D.;Tombesi Francesco;Miller;Jon M.;Zhang Wenda;Sanna Andrea

Conceptualization

2024-01-01

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Abstract

The tidal disruption of a star around a supermassive black hole (SMBH) offers a unique opportunity to study accretion onto an SMBH on a human timescale. We present results from our 1000+ days monitoring campaign of AT 2019avd, a nuclear transient with tidal-disruption-event-like properties, with NICER, Swift, and Chandra. Our primary finding is that approximately 225 days following the peak of the X-ray emission, there is a rapid drop in luminosity exceeding 2 orders of magnitude. This X-ray dropoff is accompanied by X-ray spectral hardening, followed by a plateau phase of 740 days. During this phase, the spectral index decreases from 6.2 ± 1.1 to 2.3 ± 0.4, while the disk temperature remains constant. Additionally, we detect pronounced X-ray variability, with an average fractional rms amplitude of 47%, manifesting over timescales of a few dozen minutes. We propose that this phenomenon may be attributed to intervening clumpy outflows. The overall properties of AT 2019avd suggest that the accretion disk evolves from a super-Eddington to a sub-Eddington luminosity state, possibly associated with a compact jet. This evolution follows a pattern in the hardness-intensity diagram similar to that observed in stellar-mass BHs, supporting the mass invariance of accretion-ejection processes around BHs.