November Meeting: Using Stars to Awaken the Giants at the Heart of Galaxies – How Unlucky Stars Reinvigorate Black Holes by Dr Katie Auchettl

For our November monthly meeting we are fortunate to have Dr Katie Auchettl from the University of Melbourne / University of California Santa Cruz to speak to us on Using Stars to Awaken the Giants at the Heart of Galaxies – How Unlucky Stars Reinvigorate Black Holes.

The November 2021 meeting will be a face-to-face meeting; attendees can also join in online via Zoom. Details emailed to members. Guests/visitors can contact us for Zoom details at .

Visitors are welcome to join our face-to-face or online meetings.

Please stay home and attend online if you have:
• fever or symptoms of respiratory infection (cough, sore throat, shortness of breath);
• returned from overseas in the last 14 days;
• been in close contact with a confirmed case of COVID-19: (coronavirus) in the last 14 days.

======Presentation Overview======

At the heart of nearly all galaxies, including our own, resides a black hole with a mass at least a billion times the mass of our own sun. While most of these black holes sit quietly, a star, much like our sun, can wander too close to this super massive black hole and be ripped apart and consumed by the black hole itself. These violent events are called Tidal Disruption Events or TDEs. These luminous transients can be used to study the properties of the black hole itself and even help us understand how these extreme objects devour any material in its vicinity. As optical telescopes are continuing to monitor hundreds of thousands of nearby galaxies, we are lucky enough to observe these rare events a few times a year. Here I will talk about what happens after this stellar disruption occurs, focusing on what we search for, how we separate them from other flares or transient events and what these events can tell us about the black holes themselves.