Speaker: Yuhan Yao
The X-ray Bright Tidal Disruption Event AT2021ehb
Tidal disruption events (TDEs) provide ideal laboratories to study the real-time formation of an accretion disk around a massive black hole and the subsequent disk evolution. Over the past few years, time domain sky surveys such as the optical Zwicky Transient Facility and the Spektrum-Roentgen-Gamma X-ray satellite have led to a resurgence of TDE discoveries. In this talk, I will highlight how detailed multi-wavelength studies of the nearby TDE AT2021ehb have helped us understand super-Eddington accretion. Our joint NICER+NuSTAR observations show X-ray spectral features characteristic of relativistic disk reflection for the first time in a non-jetted TDE. I will end by describing new opportunities of TDE studies offered by upcoming time domain experiments throughout the electromagnetic spectrum.