Description
Tidal disruption events (TDEs) provide insights into the extreme environments of galactic nuclei, revealing central SMBHs and their host galaxy connection. These events are over-represented in ‘post-starburst’ galaxies, which have unusual star formation histories (SFHs), high central densities, and a position in the ‘green valley.’ Understanding how these properties influence TDE rates is key to understanding their origins. In this talk, I present the largest sample of TDE host galaxies to date, analysing 125 host galaxy SFHs using Prospector fits to UV-MIR spectral energy distributions in the context of ~650 galaxies from the GAMA survey. I will discuss key results, determine the comparative fraction of hosts with recent quenching or historical starbursts, and explore reasons for any over-representation found.
Additionally, I present a significant SMBH-bulge mass relationship for 41 TDE hosts with independent SMBH mass measurements. Restricted to SMBHs below ~1e8 M⊙, TDEs allow us to calibrate the SMBH-bulge mass relation at lower masses. This enables SMBH mass estimates using only host photometry, without the need for follow-up observations or extrapolations, invaluable given predicted detection rates for upcoming surveys. After pairing host bulge masses with SMBH masses derived from late-time optical/UV plateau emission (Mummery et al., 2023), forward modelling of TDE populations with LSST survey limits investigates observational selection effects. Results suggest a steeper SMBH-bulge mass relation may be required to span the full BH mass range, including observed TDEs. We show that this proposed relation will be testable with the future LSST TDE population, offering insight into SMBH evolution.
