# # Program information file # PROGRAM_ID 2024B060 PROGRAM_TITLE SpeX Spectroscopy of eROSITA-detected Mid-Infrared Nuclear Flares PROGRAM_INV1 Megan Masterson PROGRAM_INV2 Kishalay De PROGRAM_INV3 Christos Panagiotou PROGRAM_INV4 Erin Kara PROGRAM_INV5 PROGRAM_SCICAT extra-galactic PROGRAM_ABSTRACT_BEG The dynamic infrared [IR] sky has historically been overlooked when searching for transients, yet it is one of the only ways to overcome biases in optical and X-ray surveys against dust-obscured transients. Recently, it was found that the rate of dust-obscured tidal disruption events [TDEs], discovered in the mid-IR with WISE, rivals that of optical and X-ray samples. To that end, our team has now developed a novel selection method to identify a flux-limited sample of dusty nuclear transients with WISE, extending to distant systems with different dust distributions and past SMBH activity than previous volume-limited samples. We recently cross-matched our sample with eROSITA DR1, which contains nearly 1 million X-ray sources from the deepest X-ray sky survey to date, many of which are unclassified. We propose follow-up near-IR spectroscopy with SpeX on IRTF to characterize the underlying accretion physics and classify the flares as either resulting from TDEs or changing-look AGN. Our sample contains 11 targets visible from IRTF in 2024B and requires a total of 16.5 hours. PROGRAM_ABSTRACT_END