"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 feeding 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 is about to rise dramatically with the onset of LSST. I’ll discuss how we can combine theoretical models with the rising tide of observations to investigate the SMBH mass function and accretion physics, look for SMBH binaries, and study the properties of stars on size scales we cannot observe outside our own galactic neighborhood.