Monday, February 26, 2024 at 3:30 pm

JILA auditorium

Taeho Ryu, The Max Planck Institute for Astrophysics

"Tidal disruption events: unresolved problems, challenges, and future Prospects"

Abstract:

What happens if a main-sequence star orbits very close to a supermassive black hole in a galactic center? If the star approaches within tens of times the event horizon of the black hole, the black holes's intense tidal forces would tear the star apart in a matter of hours. This dramatic event, also known as a tidal disruption event, may sound like a Sci-Fi movie. However, since its first detection in the 1990s, the number of detected events have been steadily growing thanks to ongoing surveys and telescopes, such as ZTF, ASAS-SN, and Pan-STARRS, reaching approximately one hundred. The prospect of future surveys and advanced telescopes, exemplified by the Vera C. Rubin Observatory, promises a surge in detections by several orders of magnitude over the next decade. These events offer a unique opportunity to enhance our understanding of the population of dormant massive black holes, which are otherwise challenging to identify, and distant galactic centers that can not be directly resolved. However, as the observational catalog expands, our theoretical understanding lags behind, struggling to elucidate various features unveiled by detected events. In this talk, I will address some of the unresolved problems of tidal disruption events, along with relevant challenges and emerging frontiers crucial to advancing our comprehension. I will present the results of my efforts to address these long-lasting problems with various methods, including relativistic hydrodynamics simulations and stellar evolution calculations. Lastly, I will discuss promising future directions and numerous opportunities in this field.

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