Pathways to massive black holes and compact star clusters in pre-galactic dark matter haloes with virial temperatures ≳10 000 K

By J. Regan, M. Haehnelt. 2008

162 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Large dynamic range numerical simulations of atomic cooling driven collapse of gas in pre-galactic dark matter haloes with T vir ∼ 10 000 K show that the gas loses 90 per cent and more of its angular momentum before rotational support sets in. In a fraction of these haloes where the metallicity is low and ultraviolet (UV) radiation suppresses H 2 cooling, conditions are thus very favourable for the rapid build-up of massive black holes. Depending on the progression of metal enrichment, the continued suppression of H 2 cooling by external and internal UV radiation and the ability to trap the entropy produced by the release of gravitational energy, the gas at the centre of the halo is expected to form a supermassive star, a stellar-mass black hole accreting at super-Eddington accretion rates or a compact star-cluster undergoing collisional run-away of massive stars at its centre. In all three cases, a massive black hole of initially modest mass finds itself at the centre of a rapid inflow of gas with inflow rates of ≥1 M ⊙ yr ―1 . The massive black hole will thus grow quickly to a mass of 10 5 ― 10 6 M ⊙ until further inflow is halted either by consumption of gas by star formation or by the increasing energy and momentum feedback from the growing massive black hole. Conditions for the formation of massive seed black holes in this way are most favourable in haloes with T vir ∼ 15 000 K and V vir ∼ 20 km s ―1 with less massive haloes not allowing collapse of gas by atomic cooling and more massive haloes being more prone to fragmentation. This should imprint a characteristic mass on the mass spectrum of an early population of massive black hole seeds in pre-galactic haloes which will later grow into the observed population of supermassive black holes in galactic bulges.

Subfields: Astronomy and Astrophysics, Atomic and Molecular Physics, and Optics

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/2eef5940abb327fab45c94854597efc8616d19b7

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Citations in the corpus

Evolution of supermassive stars as a pathway to black hole formation (2009, background): “…both metals and molecular hydrogen – recent simulations suggest that fragmentation may be suppressed even when the gas is much colder (Levine et al. 2008; Wise, Turk & Abel 2008; Regan & Haehnelt 2009), possibly due to the continuous generation of supersonic turbulence (Begelman & Shlosman 2009).”
What drives the growth of black holes (2011, background): “Detailed hydrodynamic simulations have explored this process (e.g., Wise et al., 2008; Regan & Haehnelt, 2009; Shang et al., 2010; Johnson et al., 2011) and indicate that supermassive stars at the centers of halos can, in principle, accrete up to a few ×105 M over ∼2 Myr (Johnson et al., 2011).”
Formation of supermassive black holes (2010, background): “Wise et al (2008) and Regan and Haehnelt (2009) have performed some idealized numerical simulations of the evolution of gaseous discs in haloes with suitable characteristics.”
Black hole formation in the early Universe (2013, background): “Various other ways for the formation of massive black holes have been suggested (Rees 1978; Djorgovski et al. 2008; Begelman & Shlosman 2009; Regan & Haehnelt 2009b; Tanaka & Haiman 2009; Volonteri 2010; Haiman 2012; Johnson et al. 2012, 2013; Choi, Shlosman & Begelman 2013; Melia 2013; Prieto,…”
The First Billion Years project: the impact of stellar radiation on the co-evolution of Populations II and III (2012, background): “One of the most promising scenarios for the formation of the seeds of supermassive black holes in the early Universe is from the collapse of relatively hot ∼ 104 K primordial gas in a small fraction of the first protogalaxies (e.g. Bromm & Loeb 2003; Begelman et al. 2006; Regan & Haehnelt 2009).”