Tidal Disruption Events in the eROSITA Era

Launched in July 2019, eROSITA on-board the SRG satellite will perform eight all-sky scans in the 0.2-10 keV energy range during its first four years of operation. With its 30-fold increased sensitivity relative to its predecessor ROSAT and its multi-visit, multi-cadence survey strategy, eROSITA is uncovering a large population of transients associated with galactic nuclei which show no strong evidence of previously being an active galactic nucleus (AGN). A subset of this population is expected to be associated with Tidal Disruption Events (TDEs), which occur when a star passes too close to a super-massive black hole (SMBH) and is torn apart by the SMBHs strong tidal gravitational field. The resulting luminous and long-lived (months-years) transients, provide valuable probes of accretion physics under strong gravity near or above the Eddington limit, and a unique way to study otherwise dormant SMBHs. In this talk, I will first present a brief overview of the SRG/eROSITA mission, and then discuss our approach for systematically identifying nuclear transients (in particular TDE candidates) within the German eROSITA datasets. This will then be followed by highlights from the first 3 all-sky surveys, including the recent detection of the remarkable nuclear transient AT 2019avd.