juliensimon/otter-tde-catalog
OTTER TDE Catalog Credit: NASA/ESA/Hubble Part of a dataset collection on Hugging Face. Dataset description All known tidal disruption events (TDEs) from the Open TDE Catalog — stars torn apart by supermassive black holes. A tidal disruption event (TDE) occurs when a star passes close enough to a supermassive black hole to be ripped apart by tidal forces, producing a luminous flare visible across the electromagnetic spectrum. The Open TDE Catalog… See the full description on the dataset page: https://huggingface.co/datasets/juliensimon/otter-tde-catalog.
OTTER TDE Catalog
<div align="center"> <img src="banner.jpg" alt="The Crab Nebula, a supernova remnant" width="400"> <p><em>Credit: NASA/ESA/Hubble</em></p> </div>
Part of a [dataset collection](https://huggingface.co/collections/juliensimon/astronomy-datasets-67c2e994a8b1a76b88ecfe22) on Hugging Face.
Dataset description
All known tidal disruption events (TDEs) from the Open TDE Catalog — stars torn apart by supermassive black holes.
A tidal disruption event (TDE) occurs when a star passes close enough to a supermassive black hole to be ripped apart by tidal forces, producing a luminous flare visible across the electromagnetic spectrum. The Open TDE Catalog aggregates all known TDE candidates with coordinates, redshifts, host galaxy identifications, and peak magnitudes.
Tidal disruption events provide a unique laboratory for studying supermassive black holes (SMBHs) that are otherwise quiescent and therefore undetectable. When a star on a low-angular-momentum orbit enters the tidal radius of an SMBH, the differential gravitational force across the star exceeds its self-gravity, shredding it into a stream of debris. Roughly half of this material becomes bound and accretes onto the black hole, producing a luminous flare that peaks in the UV/optical for lower-mass black holes (10^6--10^7 solar masses) and in the soft X-ray band for more massive ones. The light curve rise time, peak luminosity, and late-time decay rate (classically predicted to follow a t^(-5/3) power law) encode the black hole mass, the stellar mass and structure, and the orbital geometry.
The spectroscopic classification of TDEs into hydrogen-rich (TDE-H), helium-rich (TDE-He), and mixed subtypes reflects the composition of the disrupted star and the complex reprocessing of emission in the debris stream and outflows. Relativistic TDEs -- such as Swift J1644+57 -- launch powerful jets detectable at radio through hard X-ray wavelengths, providing probes of jet formation physics analogous to active galactic nuclei but in a time-resolved, 'clean' environment. The host galaxy properties (mass, morphology, nuclear activity) are critical for understanding the SMBH occupation fraction and the stellar dynamics that deliver stars to disruption orbits, with TDEs preferentially occurring in post-starburst ('E+A') galaxies for reasons that remain actively debated.
Schema
Quick stats
- 90 tidal disruption events (1990--2018)
- 77 with sky coordinates
- 84 with redshift measurements
- 37 with spectroscopic classification
- 83 with identified host galaxy
- 43 with peak magnitude
Classifications
Usage
from datasets import load_dataset
import matplotlib.pyplot as plt
ds = load_dataset("juliensimon/otter-tde-catalog", split="train")
df = ds.to_pandas()
# All confirmed TDEs
confirmed = df[df["claimed_type"] == "TDE"]
# TDEs with redshift
with_z = df[df["redshift"].notna()].sort_values("redshift")
# Nearby TDEs (z < 0.05)
nearby = df[df["redshift"] < 0.05].sort_values("redshift")
# Discoveries per year
per_year = df["discovery_year"].dropna().value_counts().sort_index()
plt.figure(figsize=(10, 5))
plt.bar(per_year.index, per_year.values, color="steelblue")
plt.xlabel("Year")
plt.ylabel("Number of TDEs discovered")
plt.title("TDE Discoveries per Year")
plt.tight_layout()
plt.show()Data source
https://github.com/astrocatalogs/tidaldisruptions
Related datasets
Citation
@dataset{otter_tde_catalog,
title = {OTTER TDE Catalog},
author = {Simon, Julien},
year = {2026},
url = {https://huggingface.co/datasets/juliensimon/otter-tde-catalog},
publisher = {Hugging Face},
note = {Derived from the project's GitHub repository, https://github.com/astrocatalogs/tidaldisruptions}
}