Assembly of supermassive black hole seeds

Becerra, Fernando; Marinacci, Federico; Hernquist, Lars

doi:10.1093/mnras/sty2210

Cited by 32 publications

(26 citation statements)

References 89 publications

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“…The introduction of sink particles and pressure floors (Machacek et al 2001) at the highest resolutions extended simulation times to a few tens of thousands of years (Latif et al 2013c;Shlosman et al 2016;Becerra et al 2018), confirming that accretion rates at the smallest scales remained high. Most recently, Chon et al (2018) and employed sink particles with radiative feedback from the protostar with a simple treatment of its evolution to follow collapse for 100 kyr and 250 kyr, respectively.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 79%

The Birth of Binary Direct-collapse Black Holes

Latif

Khochfar

Whalen

2020

ApJL

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Supermassive primordial stars forming during catastrophic baryon collapse in atomically-cooling halos at z ∼ 15 -20 may be the origin of the first quasars in the universe. However, no simulation to date has followed the evolution of these halos at resolutions that are high enough or for times that are long enough to determine if collapse actually produces SMSs. Here we report new cosmological simulations of baryon collapse in atomically-cooled halos for times that are long enough for SMSs to form and die as direct-collapse black holes (DCBHs). We find that the high infall rates required to build up such stars do persist until the end of their lives and could fuel the rapid growth of their BHs thereafter. Our simulations also demonstrate that binary and even small multiples of SMSs can form in low-spin and high-spin halos, respectively. This discovery raises the exciting possibility of detecting gravitational waves from DCBH mergers with LISA and tidal disruption events in the near infrared with the James Webb Space Telescope and ground-based telescopes in the coming decade.

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Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 79%

The Birth of Binary Direct-collapse Black Holes

Latif

Khochfar

Whalen

2020

ApJL

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“…An alternative scenario to grow SMBHs in the early Universe is to start from heavy seeds, ∼ 10 5 M BHs formed from the collapse of supermassive stars (SMSs) (Omukai 2001;Bromm & Loeb 2003;Wise et al 2008;Regan & Haehnelt 2009;Shang et al 2010;Hosokawa et al 2012;Latif et al 2013;Inayoshi et al 2014;Regan et al 2014;Becerra et al 2015;Chon et al 2016;Latif et al 2016;Becerra et al 2018;Wise et al 2019a;Maio et al 2019) or in gas-rich galaxy mergers (Mayer et al 2015;Mayer 2017;Mayer & Bonoli 2019). In the first case, gas cooling and fragmentation must be avoided to form a single supermassive object.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Light, medium-weight, or heavy? The nature of the first supermassive black hole seeds

Sassano

Schneider

Valiante

et al. 2021

Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society

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Observations of hyper-luminous quasars at z > 6 reveal the rapid growth of supermassive black holes (SMBHs $>10^9 \rm M_{\odot }$) whose origin is still difficult to explain. Their progenitors may have formed as remnants of massive, metal free stars (light seeds), via stellar collisions (medium-weight seeds) and/or massive gas clouds direct collapse (heavy seeds). In this work we investigate for the first time the relative role of these three seed populations in the formation of z > 6 SMBHs within an Eddington-limited gas accretion scenario. To this aim, we implement in our semi-analytical data-constrained model a statistical description of the spatial fluctuations of Lyman-Werner (LW) photo-dissociating radiation and of metal/dust enrichment. This allows us to set the physical conditions for BH seeds formation, exploring their relative birth rate in a highly biased region of the Universe at z > 6. We find that the inclusion of medium-weight seeds does not qualitatively change the growth history of the first SMBHs: although less massive seeds ($<10^3 \rm M_\odot$) form at a higher rate, the mass growth of a $\sim 10^9 \rm M_\odot$ SMBH at z < 15 is driven by efficient gas accretion (at a sub-Eddington rate) on to its heavy progenitors ($10^5 \rm M_\odot$). This conclusion holds independently of the critical level of LW radiation and even when medium-weight seeds are allowed to form in higher metallicity galaxies, via the so-called super-competitive accretion scenario. Our study suggests that the genealogy of z ∼ 6 SMBHs is characterized by a rich variety of BH progenitors, which represent only a small fraction ($< 10 - 20{{\ \rm per\ cent}}$) of all the BHs that seed galaxies at z > 15.

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“…The second viable scenario for BH seed formation implemented in is the so called Direct Collapse (DC) mechanism. Inside atomic-cooling halos (where 𝑇 vir ≥ 10 4 K), where metal and dust cooling is still inefficient (Z ≤ Z cr ), if the abundance of molecular hydrogen is suppressed by LW photons (11.2 − 13.6 eV) inducing H 2 photo-dissociation, the gas collapses almost iso-thermally with no fragmentation, leading to the formation of a single super massive star that becomes unstable, due to nuclear exhaustion or GR instabilities (Hosokawa et al 2012;Inayoshi et al 2014), and forms a heavy BH seed, with mass in the range [10 4 − 10 6 ] M (Latif et al 2013;Ferrara et al 2014;Becerra et al 2015;Latif & Ferrara 2016;Becerra et al 2018).…”

Section: Heavy Bh Seedsmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…This is probably due to the different BH accretion mode adopted in Delphi, which does not depend on the actual BH mass but only on the available gas mass in the host halo, at odds with our reference and super-Edd models, where BHs are assumed to grow at the Bondi-Hoyle rate. In addition, in Delphi the initial mass assumed for heavy (direct collapse) BHs is different from what we adopt in CAT: while we consider an initial mass of 10 5 M , in the center of the supposed mass range for this class of seeds Becerra et al 2018), Piana et al (2021) rely on a more conservative value of 10 3−4 M . This difference translates into a continuous mass function ranging between ∼ 10 3 − 10 10 M and possibly accounts for the observed flattening in the mass function with respect to predictions at 𝑀 BH 10 6.5 M .…”

Section: Comparison With Previous Studiesmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Recent studies have also suggested that very massive BHs (∼ 10 5 − 10 6 M ), usually referred to as heavy seeds, can form via the direct collapse of a supermassive star. The above mechanism is supposed to take place inside dark matter halos with virial temperatures 𝑇 vir > 10 4 K, where gas cooling and fragmentation is suppressed by their metal-poor composition and H 2 photo-dissociation caused by Lyman-Werner (LW) radiation (Omukai 2001;Bromm & Loeb 2003;Wise et al 2008;Regan & Haehnelt 2009;Hosokawa et al 2012;Latif et al 2013;Inayoshi et al 2014;Chon et al 2016;Becerra et al 2018) or by dynamical heating (Wise et al 2019;Lupi et al 2021) associated with strong gas inflows (Lodato & Natarajan 2006Mayer et al 2010Mayer et al , 2015Mayer & Bonoli 2019;Haemmerlé et al 2019).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

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The low-end of the black hole mass function at cosmic dawn

Trinca,

Schneider,

Valiante

et al. 2022

Preprint

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Understanding the formation and growth of supermassive black holes (SMBHs) at high redshift represents a major challenge for theoretical models. In this work we investigate the early evolution of the first SMBHs by constraining their distribution in mass and luminosity at 𝑧 > 4. In particular, we focus on the poorly explored low-mass end of the nuclear black hole (BH) distribution down to 𝑧 4, and explore its connection with the nature of the first BH seeds and the processes governing their mass growth. To this aim, we have developed CAT (Cosmic Archaeology Tool), a new semi-analytic model that describes the formation of the first stars and black holes in a self-consistent way and follows the co-evolution of nuclear BHs and their host galaxies for a representative population at 𝑧 > 4. We find that current observational constraints favour models where the growth of BH seeds is Eddington limited and occurs at the Bondi-Hoyle-Lyttleton rate or where super-Eddington accretion occurs via a slim disk during gas rich galaxy mergers. The main difference between these two model variants lies at the low-end of the predicted mass and luminosity functions at 4 ≤ 𝑧 ≤ 6, where a clear gap appears in the first model, reflecting the stunted growth of light BH seeds formed as remnants of the first stars. Detecting this signature will be extremely challenging even for the future generation of space observatories, such as JWST, Athena and Lynx.

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Assembly of supermassive black hole seeds

Cited by 32 publications

References 89 publications

The Birth of Binary Direct-collapse Black Holes

The Birth of Binary Direct-collapse Black Holes

Light, medium-weight, or heavy? The nature of the first supermassive black hole seeds

The low-end of the black hole mass function at cosmic dawn

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