Exploring galactic nuclei with tidal disruption events

Tidal disruption events (TDEs) provide an exciting opportunity to study supermassive black holes (SMBHs) in quiescent galaxies and the stellar populations and dynamics in galactic nuclei. They test the limits of black hole accretion by regularly producing super-Eddington mass fallback rates, and their emission encodes information about the properties of the disrupted star and SMBH. While these transients have long been theoretically predicted, it is only in the past ~decade that they have been discovered observationally, and the number of these observations has risen dramatically in the past few years with the onset of transient surveys such as ASASSN and ZTF. I’ll discuss how we can combine theoretical models with observations to investigate the SMBH mass function, look for SMBH binaries, and study the properties of stars on size scales we cannot observe outside our own galactic nuclei.