Graduation Year

2026

Document Type

Open Access Senior Thesis

Degree Name

Bachelor of Arts

Department

Physics

Reader 1

Elijah Quetin

Reader 2

Ulysses Sofia

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© 2026 Elliot M Schweitzer

Abstract

A tidal disruption event (TDE) occurs when a star passes within the tidal radius of the supermassive black hole (SMBH) likely to reside at the center of most galaxies. Within this radius, the star is torn apart as tidal forces overcome the star's binding energy, and roughly half of the stellar debris spirals back towards the SMBH. The formation of an accretion disk produces bright emissions for months to years, modeled to peak in the ultraviolet and extend well into x-ray and optical wavelengths. TDEs occur only about once every 104-105 years per galaxy. As one of the few ways we can probe SMBHs, TDEs are a vital source of data on SMBHs and their environments. So far, roughly 100 strong TDE candidates have been discovered. While many of these TDEs demonstrate behavior consistent with current theory, others reveal gaps in our understanding. Therefore, we search for TDEs using the Hubble Catalog of Variables (HCV), an archive composed of 84,428 variable sources imaged by the Hubble Space Telescope (HST). HST has been active for several decades and has high resolution and a limiting magnitude of ~26, far lower than many of the surveys that have found TDEs, albeit with less sky coverage. This makes the HCV a rich resource with high potential for the discovery of new TDEs. We impose several constraints to discard objects that are unlikely to be distant galaxies or do not have sufficient data to meaningfully identify them as TDE candidates. We then develop an algorithm to characterize the light curve shapes and select sources that increase then decrease in brightness. Our algorithm yields 155 sources, which we examine manually to find sources that plausibly lie within a distant galaxy and have a TDE-like rise and decay time. In total, we find five sources warranting follow up observations, including three that we present as strong TDE candidates.

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