Probing the Cosmological Evolution of Super-massive Black Holes using Tidal Disruption Flares

Understand

The question of how supermassive black holes (SMBHs) grow over cosmic time is a major puzzle in high-energy astrophysics.

• One promising approach to this problem is via the study of tidal disruption flares (TDFs).
• These are transient events resulting from the disruption of stars by quiescent supermassive black holes at centers of galaxies.
• A meter-class X-ray observatory with a time resolution $\sim$ a millisecond and a spectral resolution of a few eV at KeV energies would be revolutionary as it will facilitate high signal to noise spectral-timing studies of several cosmological TDFs.