Contributed talk at Massive Black Holes across Cosmic Time conference

Description of Activity

Title: Mapping the inner parsec of supermassive black holes with tidal disruption events

Abstract: Tidal disruption events (TDEs) offer an innovative way to map the properties of the interstellar medium (ISM) in the vicinity (<1 pc) of supermassive black holes (SMBHs). A TDE occurs when a star crosses the tidal radius of an SMBH and is disrupted by the black hole's gravitational field. As a result, half of the mass of the TDE falls into the black hole to create a transient accretion disk. During this process, a bright flare is emitted, which peaks in X-rays and hard UV. Over the last few years, my group has provided strong evidence that this high-energy radiation ionizes the ISM surrounding the SMBH to produce the high-ionization iron lines (also called "coronal lines") observed in rare, extreme coronal-line emitting galaxies (ECLEs). In this talk, I will present the evidence linking ECLEs to TDEs and show how we have already begun to use this link to map the properties of the ISM within 1 pc of the SMBH. With this method, we can probe the properties of the ISM around both active and quiescent SMBHs to shed new light on how active galactic nuclei turn on and off again.

Period	8 Sept 2025
Held at	University of Cambridge, United Kingdom
Degree of Recognition	International