Related papers: Black Swans in Astronomical Data
The tidal disruption of a star by a massive black hole (MBH) is thought to produce a transient luminous event. Such tidal disruption events (TDEs) may play an important role in the detection and characterization of MBHs and probe the…
The concept of stars being tidally ripped apart and consumed by a massive black hole (MBH) lurking in the center of a galaxy first captivated theorists in the late 1970's. The observational evidence for these rare but illuminating phenomena…
The massive black holes we observe in galaxies today are the natural end-product of a complex evolutionary path, in which black holes seeded in proto-galaxies at high redshift grow through cosmic history via a sequence of mergers and…
Pulsar timing is a promising technique for detecting low frequency sources of gravitational waves. Historically the focus has been on the detection of diffuse stochastic backgrounds, such as those formed from the superposition of weak…
Radio wavelengths offer a unique window into high-energy astrophysical phenomena that may be obscured or too rapidly evolving to be captured at other wavelengths. Leveraging data from the Very Large Array Sky Survey, we perform a systematic…
Novae, which are the sudden visual brightening triggered by runaway thermonuclear burning on the surface of an accreting white dwarf, are fairly common and bright events. Despite their astronomical significance as nearby laboratories for…
Tidal disruption events (TDEs) are a class of transients that occur when a star is destroyed by the tides of a massive black hole (MBH). Their rates encode valuable MBH demographic information, but this can only be extracted if accurate TDE…
Fast radio bursts (FRBs) are millisecond-duration intense radio flares occurring at cosmological distances. Many models have been proposed to explain these topical astronomical events, but none has so far been confirmed. Here we show that a…
Most major discoveries in astronomy are unplanned, and result from surveying the Universe in a new way, rather than by testing a hypothesis or conducting an investigation with planned outcomes. For example, of the 10 greatest discoveries…
Stars grazing supermassive black holes on bound orbits may produce periodic flares over many passages, known as repeating partial tidal disruption events (TDEs). Here, we present 3D hydrodynamic simulations of sun-like stars over multiple…
Fast radio bursts (FRBs) are mysterious extragalactic radio signals. Revealing their origin is one of the central foci in modern astronomy. Previous studies suggest that occurrence rates of non-repeating and repeating FRBs could be…
We find that the majority of systems hosting multiple tidal disruptions are likely to contain hard binary SMBH systems, and also show that the rates of these repeated events are high enough to be detected by LSST over its lifetime.…
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…
Stars that pass close to the supermassive black holes located in the center of galaxies can be violently disrupted by tidal forces, leading to flares that are observed as bright transient events in sky surveys. The rate for these events to…
When a star gets too close to a supermassive black hole, it is torn apart by the tidal forces. Roughly half of the stellar mass becomes unbound and flies away at tremendous velocities - around $10^4$ km/s. In this work we explore the idea…
There exist many observational evidences implying the expansion of our universe is undergoing a late-time acceleration, the mechanism of this acceleration is yet unknown. In the so-called thick brane model this phenomena is attributed to…
We describe a model of tidal disruption events (TDEs) with input physical parameters that include the black hole (BH) mass $M_{\bullet}$, the specific orbital energy $E$, the angular momentum $J$, the star mass $M_{\star}$ and radius…
Astronomers occasionally detect an object having unexpected shape, unexplainable photometry, or unprecedented spectra that are inconsistent with our contemporary knowledge of the universe. Upon careful assessment, many of these anomalies…
We present a physically-grounded population model for optical tidal disruption events (TDEs) that combines first-principles hydrodynamic simulations of stellar disruption with statistical inference of the underlying stellar and black hole…
Observational consequences of tidal disruption of stars (TDEs) by supermassive black holes (SMBHs) can enable us to discover quiescent SMBHs, constrain their mass function, study formation and evolution of transient accretion disks and jet…