Abstract
Tidal disruption events are expected to produce a luminous flare of radiation from fallback accretion of tidally disrupted stellar debris onto the central supermassive black hole. The first convincing candidates for tidal disruption events were discovered in the soft X-rays: large-amplitude, luminous, extremely-soft X-ray flares from inactive galaxies in the ROSAT All-Sky survey. However, the sparsely sampled light curves and lack of multiwavelength observations for these candidates make it difficult to directly constrain the parameters of their events (e.g., Eddington ratio, mass of the black hole, type of star disrupted). Here I present a review of the recent progress made in studying tidal disruption events in detail from taking advantage of wide-field, multi-epoch observations of UV and optical surveys (GALEX, SDSS, PTF, Pan-STARRS1) to measure well-sampled light curves, trigger prompt multiwavelength follow-up observations, and measure rates. I conclude with the promising potential of the next generation of optical synoptic surveys, such as LSST, to probe black hole demographics with samples of thousands of tidal disruption events.
Highlights
The characteristic temperature of a disk of stellar debris accreting onto a supermassive black hole is Te f f ≈ 2.5 × 105 M61/12r−1/2m−1/6(r/rT)−1/2 K, where M6 = MBH/(106 M ), r = R /R, m = M /M, and r/rT is the ratio of the radius of the disk to the tidal disruption radius, rT ∼ R (MBH/M )1/3
ROSAT detected luminous X-ray outbursts from several apparently inactive galaxies whose extremely soft spectra, dramatic fading on the timescale of years, and rate of ≈10−4 per year per galaxy were consistent with the theoretical expectations for tidal disruption events (TDEs)
The light curves were remarkably similar to the GALEX-selected events, and we demonstrated that their variability statistics, spatial separation from the host, colors, and color-evolution could be used to select a parameter space that distinguished them from more common interloping SNe and AGNs
Summary
The characteristic temperature of a disk of stellar debris accreting onto a supermassive black hole is Te f f ≈ 2.5 × 105 M61/12r−1/2m−1/6(r/rT)−1/2 K, where M6 = MBH/(106 M ), r = R /R , m = M /M , and r/rT is the ratio of the radius of the disk to the tidal disruption radius, rT ∼ R (MBH/M )1/3. Thermal emission with this temperature peaks in the soft X-rays, and is the ideal waveband to search for such events. Our strategy for tackling this problem has been to ”look underneath the lamppost”, and take advantage of existing wide-field multi-epoch UV and optical survey data to search for events and characterize them in more detail
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