Astrophysical and Planetary Sciences Colloquium

Monday, April 26, 2021 at 12:40

https://cuboulder.zoom.us/j/96981439846

Suvi Gezari, Space Telescope Science Institute

"A New Era of Population Studies of Tidal Disruption Events"

A Pretty Image from the Talk

Abstract:

The tidal disruption of a star by a central supermassive black hole originated as a theoretical concept, but is now a routine observational reality. Tidal disruption events (TDEs) provide a rare glimpse of massive black holes lurking in the centers of galaxies, and their luminous outbursts of radiation are valuable probes of accretion physics, jet formation, and the circumnuclear environment. TDEs are being discovered by a rich landscape of optical time domain surveys (ASAS-SN, ATLAS, Gaia, PanSTARRS, TESS, ZTF) and are being followed-up with space and ground-based facilities across the electromagnetic spectrum. I will highlight our recent sample of over 30 systematically selected, uniformly characterized TDEs from the Zwicky Transient Facility (ZTF). The growing number of TDE discoveries from these optical surveys, with hundreds more on the horizon with the start of the Vera Rubin Observatory Legacy Survey of Space and Time, are enabling us to do population studies of TDEs for the first time. I will present exciting new developments in our understanding of the physical conditions driving the light curves, broadband spectral energy distributions, and spectroscopic sub-classes in TDEs, and how they relate to the properties of their host galaxies and the masses of their central supermassive black holes.

 

Back to Speakers