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Quasi-periodic eruptions (QPEs) are intense repeating soft X-ray bursts with recurrence times about a few hours to a few weeks from galactic nuclei. More and more observations show that QPEs are associated with tidal disruption events (TDEs), especially TDEs in recently faded active galactic nucleis (AGNs). The intriguing timing pattern of QPEs indicates that (at least a fraction of) QPEs are the result of collisions between a stellar mass object and an accretion disk around a supermassive black hole (SMBH), i.e., EMRI (extreme mass ratio inspiral +disk model. From QPE timing, one can robustly measure the SMBH mass and the EMRI orbital parameters. The QPE timing method opens up the possibility for precision measurement of SMBHs, though the current bottleneck is the limited X-ray observation resources available. The multi-target X-ray telescope under construction, CATCH, will be the solution.

BIO

Zhen Pan earned his Ph.D. at the University of California, Davis in 2018 and continued his research as a postdoctoral fellow at the Perimeter Institute through 2023. He currently holds a junior faculty position at the T.D. Lee Institute and the Department of Astronomy Shanghai Jiao Tong University. His primary research efforts are dedicated to two-body and many-body problems in the field of astrophysics.

Host: Huan Yang