Probing Quiescent Massive Black Holes: Insights from Tidal Disruption Events

TL;DR

Tidal disruption events serve as a powerful observational tool to study quiescent massive black holes, their growth, and related phenomena through upcoming large-scale surveys.

Contribution

This paper highlights the potential of future synoptic surveys to address key questions about black hole assembly, intermediate mass black holes, accretion physics, and gravitational wave sources.

Findings

Large sample of tidal disruption events will inform black hole evolution.

Potential to identify intermediate mass black holes as primordial seeds.

Enhanced understanding of accretion physics and gravitational wave sources.

Abstract

Tidal disruption events provide a unique probe of quiescent black holes in the nuclei of distant galaxies. The next generation of synoptic surveys will yield a large sample of flares from the tidal disruption of stars by massive black holes that will give insights to four key science questions: 1) What is the assembly history of massive black holes in the universe? 2) Is there a population of intermediate mass black holes that are the primordial seeds of supermassive black holes? 3) How can we increase our understanding of the physics of accretion onto black holes? 4) Can we localize sources of gravitational waves from the detection of tidal disruption events around massive black holes and recoiling binary black hole mergers?