Formation of Supermassive Black Hole Seeds

By M. Latif, A. Ferrara. Publications Astronomical Society of Australia, 2016

140 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Abstract The detection of quasars at z > 6 unveils the presence of supermassive black holes of a few billion solar masses. The rapid formation process of these extreme objects remains a fascinating and open issue. Such discovery implies that seed black holes must have formed early on, and grown via either rapid accretion or BH/galaxy mergers. In this theoretical review, we discuss in detail various BH seed formation mechanisms and the physical processes at play during their assembly. We discuss the three most popular BH formation scenarios, involving the (i) core-collapse of massive stars, (ii) dynamical evolution of dense nuclear star clusters, (iii) collapse of a protogalactic metal free gas cloud. This article aims at giving a broad introduction and an overview of the most advanced research in the field.

Subfields: Astronomy and Astrophysics

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/456b0e0aefa80fa83e0c25644bd97f1e20ea06cc

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In Astronomy and Astrophysics

1. Volker Bromm
2. S. Glover
3. Ralf Klessen
4. M. Volonteri
5. L. Hernquist
6. A. Ferrara
7. P. Hopkins
8. Zoltán Haiman

Citations in the corpus

• Observational evidence for intermediate-mass black holes (2017, background): “1; for more details see reviews by e.g., Volonteri 2010, 2012; Volonteri & Bellovary 2012; Natarajan 2014; Johnson & Haardt 2016; Latif & Ferrara 2016).”
• Physical Properties of 15 Quasars at z ≳ 6.5 (2017, background): “First, their very presence at such primeval cosmic times challenges models of the formation and growth of supermassive black holes (e.g. Volonteri 2010, Latif & Ferrara 2016).”
• Titans of the early Universe: The Prato statement on the origin of the first supermassive black holes (2018, background): “…stellar clusters (e.g., Begelman & Rees 1978; Katz, Sijacki, & Haehnelt 2015; Sakurai et al. 2017), have also been the subject of significant investigation, although questions remain regarding the nature of the remnants they produce (see, e.g., Latif & Ferrara 2016, for a thorough discussion).”
• A New Sample of (Wandering) Massive Black Holes in Dwarf Galaxies from High-resolution Radio Observations (2019, background): “Moreover, the first “seed” BHs at high redshift (e.g., Latif & Ferrara 2016), which can ultimately grow to millions or billions of solar masses, are too small and faint to detect with existing telescopes (e.g., Volonteri & Reines 2016; Schleicher 2018; Vito et al. 2018).”