Faculty of Physics and Astronomy

Physics Colloquium on 20.06.2022: Unlucky Stars Illuminate Massive Black Holes

14.06.22 | Event

On Monday (20.06.22) at 12.00 c.t. the next date of our physics colloquium will take place.

The speaker will be Prof. Dr. Sjoert van Velzen (Leiden Observatory, Leiden University, NL) on the topic:

"Unlucky Stars Illuminate Massive Black Holes".

While most stars orbit around the centre of their host galaxy for their entire lifetime, a few of them are less fortunate. Two-body interactions can scatter some unlucky stars towards the supermassive black hole at the centre of the galaxy. There they will suffer a tidal disruption and the resulting stellar debris gets accreted into the black hole. These stellar tidal disruptions events are rare and result in a spectacular flare of electromagnetic radiation. Visible from radio to X-ray wavelengths, tidal disruption flares are a unique probe to study massive black holes. Over the last decade, astronomers have gotten increasingly adept at finding these events. The advent of optical transient surveys has accelerated this effort, resulting in a large number of (often unexpected)
discoveries. In this talk I will review this progress, in particular the recent discovery of neutrino counterparts to tidal disruption events.

Abstract Lecture Prof. Dr. Sjoert van Velzen

The introduction will be given by Prof. Dr. Anna Franckowiak.

The faculty cordially invites all interested parties. The event will take place in lecture hall HNB and hybrid via Zoom. Before the colloquium we offer coffee and biscuits.

This link will take you to the Zoom event (Meeting-ID: 632 5520 9938, password: 526977). All dates of the Physics Colloquium can be found here.

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