Illuminating the Darkness: Using Nuclear Transients to Study Black Holes

Historically, our study of supermassive black holes (SMBHs) has been limited largely to active galactic nuclei, which undergo long-term, relatively steady accretion. In recent years, however, the advent of modern sky surveys has led to an increase in the discovery of flares from tidal disruption events (TDEs), which in turn has allowed us to probe black holes and accretion physics in new ways. In my talk I will discuss my work using nearby TDEs discovered by the All-Sky Automated Survey for Supernovae (ASAS-SN) and other transient surveys to study SMBHs and accretion physics. I will focus in particular on observations taken shortly after TDEs begin to brighten and observations taken hundreds of days after peak light, two areas where our datasets have historically been lacking, and how observations at these times are crucial to fully understanding the physics behind these extremely energetic transients. Finally, I will close with a discussion of what questions remain to be addressed, and how the search for TDEs has led to the discovery of other, unusual nuclear outbursts which may present additional opportunities for studying what happens when existing accretion systems are significantly disrupted.