"Tidal Disruption Events: One star's death gives life to a black hole," Erin Kara, Univ of Maryland

Aspen Physics
Aspen Physics
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Published 2018-01-31
In a galaxy, once every hundred thousand years, an unsuspecting star finds itself on a collision course with the supermassive black hole quietly sitting at the center of galaxy. The gravitational forces from the black hole are just too strong for the wimpy star, and it gets torn apart. We call this violent episode a Tidal Disruption Event, and since telescopes are continuously monitoring hundreds of thousands of galaxies, astronomers actually observe these rare events a few times a year.

In this lecture, we will discuss what happens after this stellar disruption: how it produces the light we see through our telescopes, and what these events can tell us about how black holes feed and grow. In particular, Professor Kara will present a cutting-edge technique called X-ray reverberation mapping that gives us a close-up look at Tidal Disruption Events. Just as bats use echolocation to map out the structure of a dark cave, we are using light echoes to map out the gas near the black hole.
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