Unleashing the predictive power of tidal disruption events
Tsung-Dao Lee Institute/S4F-SW - Open Area
Tsung-Dao Lee Institute
Host: Zhen Pan
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Meeting ID: 489572128 (no password)
Abstract:
The tidal force from a supermassive black hole can disrupt a star passing too close, resulting in a powerful electromagnetic flare as the stellar debris fuels 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 an observational golden era 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 disrupted star. I will present progress toward this goal, which relies on a suite of interlinked simulations to follow the entire evolution of tidal disruption events and predict their electromagnetic emission.
Biography:
Clément Bonnerot received his PhD from Leiden Observatory in 2017. He then spent three years as a post-doctoral researcher in the TAPIR group at the California Institute of Technology, followed by two years as a Marie Curie fellow in the Theoretical Astrophysics Group of the Niels Bohr International Academy in Copenhagen. In February 2023, he became an Assistant Professor at the University of Birmingham. He is the holder of an ERC Starting Grant for the project Unleash-TDEs focused on tidal disruption events, with the aim of theoretically predicting their hydrodynamics and electromagnetic signatures.
