Institute for Advanced Study Informal Astrophysics Seminar

Stars are tidally disrupted by supermassive black holes when they are scattered onto low-pericenter orbits in distant galactic nuclei. Accretion of the bound debris results in a multiwavelength flare with bolometric luminosity comparable to or higher than a Type II supernovae. Despite decades of theoretical study and increasingly frequent observations (10-20 strong candidate events exist), many aspects of tidal disruption events (TDEs) remain unclear. I will describe my recent work on the dynamics of tidal disruption, which demonstrated that the traditional literature overestimated the peak luminosities of these flares (sometimes by orders of magnitude), and also showed that general relativistic precession can play a crucial role in circularizing eccentric tidal debris. I will also discuss ongoing work to estimate the rates of TDEs in realistic galactic nuclei, and the usefulness of TDE samples for constraining the uncertain SMBH occupation fraction in low mass galaxies.