Tidal disruption events, in which stars are torn apart by massive black holes, are ideal laboratories for studying the accretion and emission physics around black holes. In this talk, we will show some of our recent general relativistic magnetohydrodynamic simulations of super-Eddington disks formed in tidal disruptions and their spectra obtained via Monte Carlo radiative transfer codes. We...
After the tidal disruption event (TDE) of a star around a supermassive black hole (SMBH), if the stellar debris stream rapidly circularizes and forms a compact disc, the TDE emission is expected to peak in the soft X-ray or far ultraviolet (UV). The fact that many TDE candidates are observed to peak in the near UV and optical has challenged conventional TDE emission models. By idealizing a...
We present, for the first time, a fully self-consistent radiation hydrodynamic simulation of a realistic tidal disruption event (TDE). TDEs are highly luminous, multiwavelength astrophysical transients that carry great promise for measuring the properties of supermassive black holes, but the complex physics and large dynamic range of the problem has until now prevented self-consistent...
When a star comes too close to a supermassive black hole, it gets torn apart by strong tidal forces in a tidal disruption event. The emitted signal represents a powerful probe of these compact objects, the large majority being otherwise starved of gas and therefore undetectable. Exploiting this potential requires a precise characterization of the electromagnetic signatures from these phenomena...
A wealth of spectral data now exists for the flares that follow the tidal disruptions of stars by supermassive black holes, over a wide range of wavelengths. The information encoded in these spectra will be essential to uncovering the dynamical process by which the disruption unfolds and the radiation is generated, which remains intensely debated. However, the theoretical interpretation of...
