Institute for Advanced Study / Princeton University Joint Astrophysics Colloquium

Central massive black holes will reveal themselves in a galaxy when they flicker and flare as they feed on gas and stars. We are conducting a systematic study of nuclear transients in the Zwicky Transient Facility alert stream, and have assembled the largest ever sample of tidal disruption events (TDEs), as well as revealed new extreme populations of flaring and "changing look" AGN. TDEs provide a rare glimpse of dormant massive black holes lurking in the centers of galaxies, and their luminous outbursts of radiation are valuable probes of accretion physics, jet formation, and the circumnuclear environment and stellar population. The growing census of TDE discoveries, with hundreds more on the horizon with the start of the Vera C. Rubin Observatory Legacy Survey of Space and Time, are enabling us to do population studies of TDEs for the first time. I will present exciting new developments in our understanding of the physical conditions driving the light curves, broadband spectral energy distributions, and spectroscopic sub-classes in TDEs, and how they relate to the properties of their host galaxies and the masses of their central supermassive black holes.