24–28 Mar 2025
Florence, Italy
Europe/Rome timezone

Rapid accretion state changes in super-massive black holes

25 Mar 2025, 14:00
30m
Florence, Italy

Florence, Italy

Piazza Adua, 1, 50123 Firenze, Italia

Speaker

Mr Richard Saxton (XMM SOC, ESAC)

Description

The dynamic environment which exists in black hole accretion discs has traditionally been probed in stellar-mass Galactic black holes where the timescale for changes is short. In principle, if the quantity of material in a disc around a super-massive black hole is small and is not replenished, then the disc will drain on a timescale of a few hundred days and the system can pass through several states during a short monitoring campaign. Partial tidal disruption events, where the atmosphere of a star is stripped and consumed by a nuclear black hole, gives us the perfect opportunity to test whether disc states and state changes are mass-invariant? We present some recent results.

Primary author

Mr Richard Saxton (XMM SOC, ESAC)

Co-authors

Giovanni Miniutti Margherita Giustini (Centro de Astrobiología (CSIC-INTA))

Presentation materials