Tidal Disruption Events

Tidal disruption events, or TDEs, occur when a star is shredded by a massive black hole.  These events offer a rare opportunity to study nascent accretion disks and super-Eddington accretion onto massive black holes.  Potentially, TDEs can help to reveal the nature of black holes at the low-mass end of the AGN spectrum, and the frequency with which different galaxies serve as hosts.  It is now possible to study TDEs in a multi-wavelength sense, and observations are beginning to make significant progress. In the years ahead, as transient search experiments cover more of the sky at higher cadences, we can expect to learn even more.  In this talk, I will try to review some of the fundamentals of TDEs, and highlight some of the most intriguing recent observational and theoretical results.