Tidal forces in curved spacetimes
Tidal disruption events occur when astrophysical objects are swallowed by black holes and destroyed. The forces responsible for the deformation and destruction of the object are known as gravitational tidal forces. Such forces are described in terms of geodesic deviations. The aim of this work was to investigate tidal forces in several black hole spacetimes. Initially we studied the geodesic motion of massive particles in the following black hole metrics: Schwarzschild, Reissner-Nordström, charged Hayward and Majumdar-Papapetrou. Next, we obtained the tidal forces in each one of these spacetimes. The majority of our analyzes were restricted to the equatorial plane. In particular, we have demonstrated that the radial and angular components of the tidal forces can exhibit stretching and compression depending on the black hole parameters and the distance to the black hole(s). As an application in Astrophysics, we investigated tidal disruption events in stars that are swallowed by supermassive black holes.