Presentation #138.05 in the session “AGN and Quasars 1”.
Tidal Disruption Events (TDEs) are when a star approaches sufficiently close to a black hole to be torn apart by the black hole’s tidal forces, resulting in transient flares detectable across the electromagnetic spectrum. As a result, TDEs help us better understand supermassive black hole accretion, but TDEs can occur in a wide parameter space of stellar, black hole mass and host galaxy properties. Thus, we undertake a systematic study of approximately 100 TDE candidates to better understand which observables are most closely tied to the physical tidal disruption and accretion process. To that end, we investigate the optical photometric and spectral properties of TDEs as listed on the Open TDE Catalog (https://tde.space/). We are particularly interested in and will present preliminary results about the variation of the optical light curve decay rate with intrinsic properties of the TDEs in our sample.