Nearly 50 years ago, theorists first proposed that an outburst of radiation from the tidal disruption of a star would be a unique signpost for a dormant supermassive black hole (smbh) lurking in the…

This federal contract award NNX16AN85G was granted by the Shared Services Center, a civilian agency, to the University of Maryland, College Park. The $99,862.26 award is for a research project titled "Clearing the Fog: Systematic SWIFT UV/X-Ray Follow-Up of iPTF Nuclear Transients". The goal is to utilize the UV and X-ray capabilities of the SWIFT satellite to systematically follow up on nuclear transients detected by the Intermediate Palomar Transient Factory (iPTF) in order to distinguish between supernovae, active galactic nuclei, and genuine tidal disruption events - which can act as signposts for dormant supermassive black holes. This research aims to enable more effective identification and follow-up of tidal disruption events by future wide-field optical transient surveys like the Zwicky Transient Facility and the Large Synoptic Survey Telescope. The award does not have a set-aside designation.

Nearly 50 years ago, theorists first proposed that an outburst of radiation from the tidal disruption of a star would be a unique signpost for a dormant supermassive black hole (smbh) lurking in the center of a galaxy. Over the last decade, there has been major progress in the search for tidal disruption event (TDE) candidates in wide-field surveys across the electromagnetic spectrum. With the now archetypal TDE candidate PS1-10JH, we demonstrated that time domain observations of tdes can act not just as signposts, but also as cosmic scales to weigh smbhs in distant galaxies. The zwicky transient facility and the large synoptic survey telescope are poised to build up a statistically significant sample of TDE light curves to probe the demographics of smbhs at cosmic distances. However, in order to realize their potential as TDE discovery factories, one must be able to filter out interlopers in the transient universe which are orders of magnitude more common. Hence, we propose a key project to utilize the unique UV and x-RAY followup capabilities of swift, and capitalize on the manageable discovery rate of iptf nuclear transients, to perform a systematic, and unbiased follow-up of nuclear transients in order to clear the FOG of nuclear SNE and flaring AGN, and develop and train a real-time classification engine to enable prompt classification and follow-up of bonafide tdes among the deluge of transients to be discovered by the next generation of optical synoptic surveys.