Colloquium by Yuhan Yao, UC Berkeley
Tidal disruption events (TDEs) provide unique laboratories to study the demographics, immediate stellar and gaseous environments, and accretion physics of the massive black hole population. Over the past few years, time domain sky surveys such as the optical Zwicky Transient Facility (ZTF) have led to a surge of TDE discoveries in galaxy centers. In this talk, I will first summarize our efforts to understand black hole demographics with TDEs, including inferring the shape of the local black hole mass function down to ~105 Msun and searching for the population of off-nuclear wandering black holes. Next, I will present how detailed X-ray studies of some ZTF-discovered TDEs have revealed the evolving inflow and outflow properties during the black hole super-Eddington accretion phase. In the end, I will describe new opportunities in the studies of TDEs and related nuclear transients offered by upcoming time domain experiments.
Cookies will be available, starting at 3:45.
Host: Kishalay De