Truth or Flare: Delayed Radio Emission Raises Questions About Tidal Disruption Events

Title: Delayed Radio Flares from a Tidal Disruption Event
Authors: A. Horesh, S. B. Cenko, I. Arcavi
First author’s institution: Racah Institute of Physics, The Hebrew University of Jerusalem
Journal: Published in Nature Astronomy. Open access on ArXiv.
Disclaimer: The author would first like to publicly state that Black lives and Black Trans lives matter. Secondly, the author condemns all police brutality against people of color. Lastly, the author recognizes that the writing of this article was performed on the stolen land of indigenous people.

One of These Events is Not Like the OthersMain sequence stars (like our sun) and supermassive black holes (SMBHs) don’t really get along. If such a star finds itself orbiting too close to the galactic center, it becomes indefinitely trapped in a gravitational spider web formed by the SMBH. With escape now impossible, the star enters a death plunge wherein the SMBH violently shreds the star, forming a turbulent accretion disk of infalling stellar material. The brilliant emission of photons that results from this stellar demise is called a tidal disruption event (TDE). The specific type of electromagnetic radiation that astronomers detect from TDEs appears to be directly linked to the physical mechanisms ...