Shocking news - a polarising study of a tidal disruption event

Supermassive black holes have been known to disrupt passing stars producing outbursts called tidal disruption events (TDEs) offering a unique view on the early stages of the accretion disk and jet formation. The advent of large-scale optical time-domain surveys has significantly increased the number of known events and challenged our understanding of their dynamics and emission pro- cesses. Especially, the so-called optical TDEs have shown late-time X-ray and radio emission years after the optical peak emission indicating delayed accretion disk formation and long timescales for the circularization process. In this seminar, I will present our study on the most polarized TDE up-to-date without any indication of contribution from a jet to the emission. Our observations demonstrate that optical TDE emission can be powered by tidal stream shocks.