Speaker
Description
While most stars orbit about the center of their host galaxy for their entire lifetime, a few of them are less fortunate. Two-body interactions can scatter an unlucky star towards the supermassive black hole at the center of the galaxy. This star will suffer a tidal disruption and the resulting stellar debris gets accreted into the black hole. These stellar tidal disruptions events are rare and result in a spectacular flare of electromagnetic radiation. Visible from radio to X-ray wavelengths, tidal disruption flares are a unique probe to study massive black holes. Over the last decade, astronomers have gotten increasingly adept at finding these events. The advent of optical transient surveys has accelerated this effort, resulting in a large number of (often unexpected) discoveries. In this talk I will review this progress, in particular the recent discovery of neutrino counterparts to tidal disruption events.
