Image Details

Choose export citation format:

Merger-driven or Internal Evolution? A New Morphological Study of Tidal Disruption Event Host Galaxies

  • Authors: Janet N.Y. Chang, Connor Bottrell, Lixin Dai, Rudrani Kar Chowdhury, Meng Gu, Renbin Yan, Leonardo Ferreira, Sara L. Ellison, Scott Wilkinson, Thomas de Boer

Janet N.Y. Chang et al 2026 The Astrophysical Journal Letters 1004 .

  • Provider: AAS Journals

Caption: Figure 5.

Concentration parameter analysis for TDE host galaxies and their control samples. The top panel presents the STATMORPH concentration parameter Cstat for TDE host galaxies (star symbols) and their control sample (cross symbols) as a function of MBH, M*, and z. The measurements are based on UNIONS images (orange) when available, and SDSS images (blue) otherwise. Importantly, the control sample measurements were weighted-averaged over 500 samples and consistently derived from the same survey as their TDE host galaxy. The bottom panel displays the difference in concentration, ﹩{\rm{\Delta }}{C}_{{\rm{stat}}}={C}_{{\rm{stat}},{\rm{TDE}}}-{\bar{C}}_{{\rm{stat}},{\rm{control}}}﹩, with 1σ error bars. The shaded region indicates the mean ΔCstat for the UNIONS (orange), SDSS (blue), and combined (green) subsets. A dashed line marks ΔCstat = 0. The rightmost panel provides a histogram of ΔC for these different samples. Overall, these results demonstrate that TDE host galaxies exhibit a significantly higher concentration parameter compared to their control samples, with an average ΔCstat = 0.32 ± 0.03, implying TDE host galaxies are ∼16% more concentrated.

Other Images in This Article
Copyright and Terms & Conditions

Additional terms of reuse