The Process of Stellar Tidal Disruption by Supermassive Black Holes. The first pericenter passage

Understand

Tidal disruption events (TDEs) are among the brightest transients in the optical, ultraviolet, and X-ray sky.

• These flares are set into motion when a star is torn apart by the tidal field of a massive black hole, triggering a chain of events which is -- so far -- incompletely understood.
• However, the disruption process has been studied extensively for almost half a century, and unlike the later stages of a TDE, our understanding of the disruption itself is reasonably well converged.
• In this Chapter, we review both analytical and numerical models for stellar tidal disruption.