Astronomy Colloquium - Andrew Mummery (IAS)
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Title: Black holes, disks and jets: understanding the multi wavelength world of tidal disruption eventsAbstract: When unfortunate stars are scattered sufficiently close to a massive black hole they can be ripped apart, in their entirety, by tidal forces. These so-called tidal disruption events (TDEs) power multi wavelength flares which promise to offer insight into a wide range of questions in contemporary astrophysics, including the evolution, stability, and scale invariance of black hole accretion, the physics of jet launching, and black hole demographics (among many more). I will first discuss recent advances in our understanding of transient black hole accretion physics, before showing how this understanding allows us to maximize the utility of current and forthcoming multi wavelength TDE data sets. I will show that the optical TDE sample discovered by ZTF allows us to add ~50 low mass black holes to the M-sigma diagram, while the LSST survey will lead to of order ~1000 s
