2016ApJ...832..188D

The sporadic accretion following the tidal disruption of a star by a super-massive black hole (TDE) leads to a bright UV and soft X-ray flare in the galactic nucleus. The gas and dust surrounding the black hole responses to such a flare with an echo in emission lines and infrared emission. In this paper, we report the detection of long fading mid-IR emission lasting up to 14 years after the flare in four TDE candidates with transient coronal lines using the WISE public data release. We estimate that the reprocessed mid-IR luminosities are in the range between 4×10⁴² and 2×10⁴³ erg s^–1 and dust temperature in the range of 570-800 K when WISE first detected these sources three to five years after the flare. Both luminosity and dust temperature decrease with time. We interpret the mid-IR emission as the infrared echo of the tidal disruption flare. We estimate the UV luminosity at the peak flare to be 1 to 30 times 10⁴⁴ erg s^–1 and that for warm dust masses to be in the range of 0.05-1.3 M_☉ within a few parsecs. Our results suggest that the mid-infrared echo is a general signature of TDE in the gas-rich environment.