XMMSL1J063045.9-603110: a tidal disruption event fallen into the back burner

Abstract

Black holes at the centre of quiescent galaxies can be switched on when they accrete gas that is gained from stellar tidal disruptions. A star approaching a black hole on a low angular momentum orbit may be ripped apart by tidal forces, which triggers raining down of a fraction of stellar debris onto the compact object through an accretion disc and powers a bright flare. In this paper we discuss XMMSL1J063045.9-603110 as a candidate object for a tidal disruption event. The source has recently been detected to be bright in the soft X-rays during an XMM-Newton slew and later showed an X-ray flux decay by a factor of about 10 in twenty days. We analyse XMM-Newton and Swift data. XMMSL1J063045.9-603110 shows several features typical of tidal disruption events: the X-ray spectrum shows the characteristics of a spectrum arising from a thermal accretion disc, the flux decay follows a t^-5/3 law, and the flux variation is >350. Optical observations testify that XMMSL1J063045.9-603110 is probably associated with an extremely small galaxy or even a globular cluster, which suggests that intermediate-mass black holes are located in the cores of (at least) some of them.