Related papers: A likely decade-long sustained tidal disruption ev…
This article provides a summary of XMM-Newton highlights on stellar tidal disruption events. First found with ROSAT, ongoing and upcoming sky surveys will detect these events in the 1000s. In X- rays, tidal disruption events (TDEs) provide…
The luminosity function of active galactic nuclei has been measured down to luminosities ~10^{42} erg/s in the soft and hard X-rays. Some fraction of this activity is associated with the accretion of the material liberated by the tidal…
We report the serendipitous discovery of a bright point source flare in the Abell cluster 1795 with archival EUVE and Chandra observations. Assuming the EUVE emission is associated with the Chandra source, the X-ray 0.5-7 keV flux declined…
The ultrasoft X-ray flare 2XMMi J184725.1-631724 was serendipitously detected in two XMM-Newton observations in 2006 and 2007, with a peak luminosity of 6X10^43 erg/s. It was suggested to be a tidal disruption event (TDE) because its…
Black holes at the centre of quiescent galaxies can be switched on when they accrete gas that is gained from stellar tidal disruptions. A star approaching a black hole on a low angular momentum orbit may be ripped apart by tidal forces,…
Aims: A strong, hard X-ray flare was discovered (IGR J12580+0134) by INTEGRAL in 2011, and is associated to NGC 4845, a Seyfert 2 galaxy never detected at high-energy previously. To understand what happened we observed this event in the…
Observations of luminous flares resulting from the possible tidal disruption of stars by supermassive black holes have raised a number of puzzles. Outstanding questions include the origin of the optical and ultraviolet (UV) flux, the…
Owing to their thermal emission, tidal disruption events (TDEs) were regularly detected in the soft X-rays and sometimes in the optical. Only a few TDEs have been detected at hard X-rays: two are high redshift beamed events, one of which…
Optical transient surveys have led to the discovery of dozens of stellar tidal disruption events (TDEs) by massive black hole in the centers of galaxies. Despite extensive searches, X-ray follow-up observations have produced no or only weak…
Stars captured by black holes (BHs) can be torn apart by strong tidal forces, producing electromagnetic flares. To date, more than 100 tidal disruption events (TDEs) have been observed, each involving invariably normal gaseous stars whose…
We propose a model to explain the time delay between the peak of the optical and X-ray luminosity, \dt hereafter, in UV/optically-selected tidal disruption events (TDEs). The following picture explains the observed \dt in several TDEs as a…
Tidal disruption events of stars by supermassive black holes have so far been discovered months to years after the fact. In this paper we explore the short, faint and hard burst of radiation is emitted at maximum compression, as a result of…
We analyze stellar tidal disruption events as a possible observational signature of gravitational wave induced recoil of supermassive black holes. As a black hole wanders through its galaxy, it will tidally disrupt bound and unbound stars…
A star that passes too close to a massive black hole will be torn apart by tidal forces. The flare of photons emitted during the accretion of the stellar debris is predicted to be observable and candidates of such events have been observed…
As part of our ongoing archival X-ray survey of galaxy clusters for tidal flares, we present evidence of an X-ray transient source within 1 arcmin of the core of Abell 1795. The extreme variability (a factor of nearly 50), luminosity (> 2 x…
Several galaxies have exhibited X-ray flares that are consistent with the tidal disruption of a star by a central supermassive black hole. In theoretical treatments of this process it is usually assumed that the star was initially on a…
We study X-ray bright tidal disruption events (TDE), close to the peak of their emission, with the intention of understanding the evolution of their light curves and spectra. Candidate TDE are identified by searching for soft X-ray flares…
Supermassive black holes can experience super-Eddington peak mass fallback rates following the tidal disruption of a star. The theoretical expectation is that part of the infalling material is expelled by means of an accretion disk wind,…
During a tidal disruption event, a star is torn apart by the tidal forces of a supermassive black hole, with about 50% of the star's mass eventually accreted by the black hole. The resulting flare can, in extreme cases of super-Eddington…
Tidal disruption of main sequence stars by black holes has generally been thought to lead to a signal dominated by UV emission. If, however, the black hole spins rapidly and the poloidal magnetic field intensity on the black hole horizon is…