The evolution of massive black hole seeds

By M. Volonteri, G. Lodato, P. Natarajan. 2007

288 citations recorded by the source corpus.

We investigate the evolution of high-redshift seed black hole masses at late times and their observational signatures. The massive black hole seeds studied here form at extremely high redshifts from the direct collapse of pre-galactic gas discs. Populating dark matter haloes with seeds formed in this way, we follow the mass assembly of these black holes to the present time using a Monte Carlo merger tree. Using this machinery, we predict the black hole mass function at high redshifts and at the present time, the integrated mass density of black holes and the luminosity function of accreting black holes as a function of redshift. These predictions are made for a set of three seed models with varying black hole formation efficiency. Given the accuracy of present observational constraints, all three models can be adequately fitted. Discrimination between the models appears predominantly at the low-mass end of the present-day black hole mass function which is not observationally well constrained. However, all our models predict that low surface brightness, bulgeless galaxies with large discs are least likely to be sites for the formation of massive seed black holes at high redshifts. The efficiency of seed formation at high redshifts has a direct influence on the black hole occupation fraction in galaxies at z = 0. This effect is more pronounced for low-mass galaxies. This is the key discriminant between the models studied here and the Population III remnant seed model. We find that there exist a population of low-mass galaxies that do not host nuclear black holes. Our prediction of the shape of the M BH -σ relation at the low-mass end is in agreement with the recent observational determination from the census of low-mass galaxies in the Virgo cluster.

Subfields: Astronomy and Astrophysics, Instrumentation

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/2eab7ba4b893ddf63df0dcaa8626b9e81349b1f6

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Citations in the corpus

Evidence for heavy-seed origin of early supermassive black holes from a z ≈ 10 X-ray quasar (2023, unknown): “Because information about the initial seeding of BHs is mostly erased during the complex growth and subsequent evolution of BHs over cosmic time 29,30 , the detection of the X-ray quasar in UHZ1 at z ≈ 10.3 opens up a new, exciting frontier.”
Science with the space-based interferometer eLISA. III: probing the expansion of the universe using gravitational wave standard sirens (2016, unknown): “Several versions of this heavy-seed scenario have been proposed [31–34], but here we follow Paper I and adopt the model of [34].”
Testing modified gravity at cosmological distances with LISA standard sirens (2019, methodology): “Regarding the seeding model, we adopt two distinct scenarios: a light seed scenario in which the massive black hole population evolves from the remnants of population III (popIII) stars (with remnant masses ∼ 100M ) at high redshifts z & 15 [182]; and a heavy seed scenario in which the black hole se”
Probing the first stars and black holes in the early Universe with the Dark Ages Radio Explorer (DARE) (2008, background): “…black holes remains even more of a mystery than the first stars, forming either as ~10-100 solar mass remnants from those stars’ explosions (e.g., Volonteri et al. 2008) or in much larger seeds (up to ~10,000 solar masses) via the direct collapse of gas in unusual environments where star…”