AT2022zod

Tidal Disruption Events (TDEs) have long been hypothesized as valuable indicators of black holes, offering insight into their demographics and behaviour out to high redshift. TDEs have also enabled the discovery of a few Massive Black Holes (MBHs) with inferred masses of 104–106 M⊙, often associated with the nuclei of dwarf galaxies or ultra-compact dwarf galaxies (UCDs). Here we present AT2022zod, an extreme, short-lived optical flare in an elliptical galaxy at z = 0.11, residing within 3 kpc from the galaxy’s centre. Its luminosity and ∼30-day duration make it unlikely to have originated from the host galaxy’s central supermassive black hole (SMBH), which we estimate to have a mass of ∼ 108 M⊙. Assuming that the emission mechanism is consistent with known observed TDEs, we find that such a rapidly evolving transient could either be produced by a MBH in the intermediate-mass range or, alternatively, result from the tidal disruption of a star on a non-parabolic orbit around the central SMBH.