  The concept of stars being tidally ripped apart and consumed by a massive
black hole (MBH) lurking in the center of a galaxy first captivated theorists
in the late 1970's. The observational evidence for these rare but illuminating
phenomena for probing otherwise dormant MBHs, first emerged in archival
searches of the soft X-ray ROSAT All-Sky Survey in the 1990's; but has recently
accelerated with the increasing survey power in the optical time domain, with
tidal disruption events (TDEs) now regarded as a class of optical nuclear
transients with distinct spectroscopic features. Multiwavelength observations
of TDEs have revealed panchromatic emission, probing a wide range of scales,
from the innermost regions of the accretion flow, to the surrounding
circumnuclear medium. I review the current census of 56 TDEs reported in the
literature, and their observed properties can be summarized as follows:
$\bullet$ The optical light curves follow a power-law decline from peak that
scales with the inferred central black hole mass as expected for the fallback
rate of the stellar debris, but the rise time does not. $\bullet$ The
UV/optical and soft X-ray thermal emission come from different spatial scales,
and their intensity ratio has a large dynamic range, and is highly variable,
providing important clues as to what is powering the two components. $\bullet$
They can be grouped into three spectral classes, and those with Bowen
fluorescence line emission show a preference for a hotter and more compact
line-emitting region, while those with only He II emission lines are the rarest
class.
