Clément Bonnerot Seminar: Unleashing the Predictive Power of Tidal Disruption Events

Abstract

The tidal force from a supermassive black hole can disrupt a star that passes too close, resulting in a powerful electromagnetic flare as the stellar debris feeds the compact object. Such tidal disruption events provide a unique window into the otherwise hidden population of quiescent supermassive black holes and can offer clues to the mystery of their formation mechanism in the early Universe. With the advent of the Rubin Observatory, we are entering a golden age of observation, with thousands of events expected to be discovered, increasing our current sample by two orders of magnitude. Fully exploiting this potential requires a robust theoretical framework that characterizes the observational signatures produced and links them to the properties of the black hole and the disrupted star. I will present progress toward this goal, which relies on a suite of interlinked simulations to track the entire evolution of tidal disruption events and predict their electromagnetic emission.