Journal article

A Swift Fix for Nuclear Outbursts

JT Hinkle, TWS Holoien, BJ Shappee, K Auchettl

Astrophysical Journal | IOP Publishing Ltd | Published : 2021

Abstract

In November 2020, the Swift team announced an update to the UltraViolet and Optical Telescope calibration to correct for the loss of sensitivity over time. This correction affects observations in the three near-ultraviolet (UV) filters, by up to 0.3 mag in some cases. As UV photometry is critical to characterizing tidal disruption events (TDEs) and other peculiar nuclear outbursts, we recomputed published Swift data for TDEs and other singular nuclear outbursts with Swift photometry in 2015 or later as a service to the community. Using archival UV, optical, and infrared photometry, we ran host SED fits for each host galaxy. From these, we computed synthetic host magnitudes and host-galaxy pr..

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University of Melbourne Researchers

Grants

Awarded by NASA


Awarded by NASA through the NASA Hubble Fellowship - Space Telescope Science Institute


Awarded by NSF


Awarded by Australian Research Council Centre of Excellence for All Sky Astrophysics in 3 Dimensions (ASTRO 3D)


Awarded by Spanish MINECO


Funding Acknowledgements

We thank the referee for helpful comments that have improved this paper. We also thank Christopher Kochanek for helpful discussions. J.T.H. and this work were supported by NASA award 80NSSC21K0136. Support for T.W.-S.H. was provided by NASA through the NASA Hubble Fellowship grant HST-HF2-51458.001-A awarded by the Space Telescope Science Institute, which is operated by the Association of Universities for Research in Astronomy, Inc., for NASA, under contract NAS5-26555. B.J.S. is supported by NSF grants AST-1908952, AST-1920392, AST-1911074, and NASA award 80NSSC19K1717. Parts of this research were supported by the Australian Research Council Centre of Excellence for All Sky Astrophysics in 3 Dimensions (ASTRO 3D), through project number CE170100013. This research has made use of the SVO Filter Profile Service (http://svo2.cab.inta-csic.es/theory/fps/) supported from the Spanish MINECO through grant AYA2017-84089.