Tidal disruption event

A tidal disruption event (also known as a tidal disruption flare) is an astronomical phenomenon that occurs when a star approaches sufficiently close to a supermassive black hole that it is pulled apart by the black hole's tidal force, experiencing spaghettification. A portion of the star's mass can be captured into an accretion disk around the black hole, resulting in a temporary flare of electromagnetic radiation as matter in the disk is consumed by the black hole. A tidal disruption event (also known as a tidal disruption flare) is an astronomical phenomenon that occurs when a star approaches sufficiently close to a supermassive black hole that it is pulled apart by the black hole's tidal force, experiencing spaghettification. A portion of the star's mass can be captured into an accretion disk around the black hole, resulting in a temporary flare of electromagnetic radiation as matter in the disk is consumed by the black hole. According to early papers (see History section), tidal disruption events should be an inevitable consequence of massive black holes activity hidden in galaxy nuclei, whereas later theorists concluded that the resulting explosion or flare of radiation from the accretion of the stellar debris could be a unique signpost for the presence of a dormant black hole in the center of a normal galaxy. It was in 1971 that for the first time the theorist John A. Wheeler suggested that the breakup of a star in the ergosphere of a rotating black hole could induce acceleration of the released gas to relativistic speeds by the so-called 'tube of toothpaste effect'. Wheeler succeeded in applying the relativistic generalization of the classical Newtonian tidal disruption problem to the neighborhood of a Schwarzschild or a Kerr black hole (without axial rotation or in rotation, cf. Fishbone (1973) and Mashhoon (1975, 1977)). But these early works restricted their attention to incompressible star modelsand/or to stars penetrating slightly into the Roche radius, thus undergoing only tides of small amplitudes or, at best, only quiescent disruption phenomena (aka the future TDE). In 1976 in the 'MNRAS' astronomers Juhan Frank and Martin F. Rees of the Cambridge Institute of Astronomy evoked for the first time 'the effect of massive black holes on stellar systems', defining a critical radius under which stars are disturbed and literally sucked up by the black hole, suggesting that it is possible to observe these events in certain galaxies. But at the time, the English researchers did not propose any precise model or simulation. This speculative prediction and this lack of theoretical tools aroused the curiosity of Jean-Pierre Luminet and Brandon Carter of the Paris Observatory in the early 1980s who invented the concept of TDE. Their first works were published in 1982 in the journal Nature and in 1983 in the Astronomy & Astrophysics. The authors had managed to describe the tidal disturbances in the heart of AGNs based on the 'stellar pancake outbreak' model to use Luminet's expression, a model describing the tide field generated by a 'big black hole' - let's say supermassive - and the effect they called the 'pancake detonation' to qualify the radiation outbreak resulting from these disturbances. Then in 1986, Luminet and Carter published in the journal Astrophysical Journal Supplement an important article of 29 pages in which they analyzed all the cases of TDE and not only the 10% producing 'spaghettifications' and other 'pancakes flambées'. It was only a decade later, in 1990, that the first TDE-compliant candidates were detected through NASA's 'All Sky' X-ray survey of NASA's ROSAT satellite. Since then, more than a dozen candidates have been discovered, including more active sources in ultraviolet or visible for a reason that remained mysterious. Finally, the theory of Luminet and Carter was confirmed by the observation of spectacular eruptions resulting from the accretion of stellar debris by a massive object located in the heart of the AGN (e.g. NGC 5128 or NGC 4438) but also in the heart of the Milky Way (Sgr A *). The TDE theory even explains the superluminous supernova SN 2015L, better known by the code name ASASSN-15lh, a marial supernova that exploded just before being absorbed beneath the horizon of a massive black hole. Today, all known TDEs and TDE candidates have been listed in 'The Open TDE Catalog' run by the Harvard CfA, which has had 87 entries since 1999.