Hannah Dykaar is currently a PhD student at the Dunlap Institute and the Department of Astronomy & Astrophysics at the University of Toronto, where she works with Professors Maria Drout and Bryan Gaensler. Her research focuses on tidal disruption events (TDEs), which occur when stars get sufficiently close to supermassive black holes and are torn apart. She is particularly interested in detecting these events through wide-field radio surveys. As of February 2025, she will be a postdoc at McGill University working with Professors Daryl Haggard and John Ruan.
Title: Tidal Disruption Events: When a Black Hole Destroys a Star
Abstract: Tidal disruption events (TDEs) occur when a star ventures too close to a supermassive black hole, and the tidal forces overcome the star's self-gravity, causing a multiwavelength transient flare. These events illuminate the complex environments of galactic centers in what may otherwise be dormant galaxies. Historically identified through shorter-wavelength observations, TDEs have benefited from recent advances in radio interferometry, ushering in a new era of TDE detection and follow-up studies. In this seminar, I will explore how radio observations are enhancing our understanding of TDEs. I will discuss a population of radio-discovered TDE candidates from the time-domain radio survey VAST, providing an independent estimate of the TDE rate. I will also present radio follow-up observations of a repeating partial TDE, in which the stellar core survives the initial disruption and is subsequently disrupted again.
Location Information
200 University Avenue West
Waterloo, ON, CA N2L 3G1
