Tidal disruption events in the multi-wavelength era

  • Abstract:

Most galaxies harbor non-active super-massive black holes (BHs). Roughly once every 10^4 - 10^5 years in each galaxy, a star enters the BH's tidal disruption radius within which the tidal force of the BH exceeds the star's self gravity, and hence the star gets tidally disrupted. In these tidal disruption events (TDEs), the stellar debris feeds a burst of super-Eddington accretion that generates a bright flare of electromagnetic radiation. In the recent decade or so, several dozen such flares have been discovered by transient surveys in various wavelengths from gamma/X-ray to UV and optical. In addition, the discoveries of Sw J1644+57 and Sw J2058+05 showed that the TDE accretion disk can launch relativistic jets. TDEs offer a new window for studying many astrophysical puzzles, such as super-Eddington MHD accretion physics, population of non-active super-massive BHs, radiation mechanism of relativistic jets, etc.          

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I'll talk about some recent/on-going work with my advisor and collaborators. (1) We find that the bright X-rays from Sw J2058+05 is consistent with the external inverse-Compton mechanism. (2) A typical TDE emits about 10^51 - 10^52 erg of UV/optical energy, which will be absorbed by surrounding dust and re-radiated in the mid-IR. (3) We show that the central massive objects causing TDEs must be black holes because they have event horizons.

  •  Education:

2013 Bachelor of Science,  Peking University, Major: Physics,  Advisor: Zhuo Li2013 – now Graduate student,  University of Texas at Austin,  Major: Astronomy,  Advisor: Pawan Kumar

  • Research Interest:

Theoretical high-energy astrophysics, tidal disruption events, gamma-ray bursts, fast radio bursts, Computational astrophysics  

Speaker: 
Wenbin Lu
Location: 
KIAA, 1st floor meeting room
Time: 
Tue, 2016-05-31 12:00 to 13:00