Tidal disruption of stars by super‐massive black holes—XMM‐Newton highlights and the next decade

Abstract

This article provides a summary of XMM‐Newton highlights on stellar tidal disruption events. First found with ROSAT, ongoing and upcoming sky surveys will detect these events in the thousands. In X‐rays, tidal disruption events (TDEs) provide us with powerful new probes of accretion physics under extreme conditions and on short timescales and of relativistic effects near the super‐massive black holes (SMBHs), of the formation and evolution of disk winds near or above the Eddington limit, and of the processes of high‐energy emission from newly launched radio jets. TDEs serve as signposts of the presence of dormant single black holes at the cores of galaxies, and of binary black holes as well, since TDE lightcurves are characteristically different in the latter case. XMM‐Newton has started to contribute to all of these topics, and a rich discovery space is opening up in the next decade.