Black hole formation in the early Universe

By M. Latif, D. Schleicher, Wolfram Schmidt, Jens C. Niemeyer. 2013

180 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Supermassive black holes with up to a $\rm 10^{9}~M_{\odot}$ dwell in the centers of present-day galaxies, and their presence has been confirmed at z $\geq$ 6. Their formation at such early epochs is still an enigma. Different pathways have been suggested to assemble supermassive black holes in the first billion years after the Big Bang. Direct collapse has emerged as a highly plausible scenario to form black holes as it provides seed masses of $\rm 10^{5}-10^{6}~M_{\odot}$. Gravitational collapse in atomic cooling haloes with virial temperatures T$_{vir} \geq 10^{4}$~K may lead to the formation of massive seed black holes in the presence of an intense background UV flux. Turbulence plays a central role in regulating accretion and transporting angular momentum. We present here the highest resolution cosmological large-eddy simulations to date which track the evolution of high-density regions on scales of $0.25$~AU beyond the formation of the first peak, and study the impact of subgrid-scale turbulence. The peak density reached in these simulations is $\rm 1.2 \times 10^{-8}~g~cm^{-3}$. Our findings show that while fragmentation occasionally occurs, it does not prevent the growth of a central massive object resulting from turbulent accretion and occasional mergers. The central object reaches $\rm \sim 1000~M_{\odot}$ within $4$ free-fall times, and we expect further growth up to $\rm 10^{6}~M_{\odot}$ through accretion in about 1 million years. The direct collapse model thus provides a viable pathway of forming high-mass black holes at early cosmic times.

Subfields: Astronomy and Astrophysics

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/5bc071cd89c83da5398cee5f8769114dbd41d6d8

How researchers see this paper

The researchers whose trusted networks rank it highest, strongest advocate first. Every researcher gets a different order.

In Astronomy and Astrophysics

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

Citations in the corpus

• FORMATION OF MASSIVE PRIMORDIAL STARS: INTERMITTENT UV FEEDBACK WITH EPISODIC MASS ACCRETION (2015, background): “As a result, very rapid accretion and sufficient material (high Jeans mass) is expected to be available within the stellar lifetime of ∼Myr, during which the stellar mass could attain values & 105 M (e.g., Regan & Haehnelt 2009; Latif et al. 2013; Inayoshi et al. 2014).”
• Formation of Supermassive Black Hole Seeds (2016, methodology): “…a Jeans resolution of 4 cells did not observe any fragmentation (Bromm & Loeb 2003; Wise et al. 2008; Regan & Haehnelt 2009; Prieto et al. 2013; Latif et al. 2013a) while the simulations employing both higher Jeans (64 cells per Jeans length) as well as spatial resolution show that…”
• Blossoms from black hole seeds: properties and early growth regulated by supernova feedback (2016, background): “…or thermodynamical conditions (Loeb & Rasio 1994; Bromm & Loeb 2003; Koushiappas, Bullock & Dekel 2004; Spaans & Silk 2006; Begelman, Volonteri & Rees 2006; Lodato & Natarajan 2006; Dijkstra et al. 2008; Wise, Turk & Abel 2008; Regan & Haehnelt 2009; Latif et al. 2013), making it less common.”
• DISCOVERY OF THREE z > 6.5 QUASARS IN THE VISTA KILO-DEGREE INFRARED GALAXY (VIKING) SURVEY (2013, background): “…the number density of high redshift quasars provide constraints on the mechanisms that are required to seed and grow >109 M supermassive black holes less than a Gyr after the big bang (e.g., Latif et al. 2013); and (3) high redshift quasars are generally located in luminous, massive host galaxies.”
• Titans of the early Universe: The Prato statement on the origin of the first supermassive black holes (2018, background): “…hydrodynamical simulations show that the gas cloud is unlikely to fragment into gravitationally bound clumps during the runaway collapse phase and forms a central protostar surrounding a massive accretion disk (Latif et al. 2013b; Inayoshi, Omukai, & Tasker 2014; Becerra et al. 2015).”
• FORMATION OF PRIMORDIAL SUPERMASSIVE STARS BY RAPID MASS ACCRETION (2013, background): “Numerical models suggest that one or more supermassive stars may form in either spherical infall or disks (e.g., Bromm & Loeb 2003; Regan & Haehnelt 2009; Latif et al. 2013a,b).”
• BLACK HOLE MASS ESTIMATES AND EMISSION-LINE PROPERTIES OF A SAMPLE OF REDSHIFT z > 6.5 QUASARS (2013, methodology): “…et al. 2011; Mortlock et al. 2011; Simcoe et al. 2012), the formation and early growth of supermassive black holes (SMBHs; e.g., Volonteri 2010; Latif et al. 2013), the galaxy formation processes (e.g., Walter et al. 2009; Wang et al. 2013), and the interstellar medium chemical evolution…”
• An 800-million-solar-mass black hole in a significantly neutral Universe at a redshift of 7.5 (2017, background): “Its absorption profile is then specified by four parameters: (1) the ionizing luminosity of the quasar (constrained by photometry), (2) the size of the proximity zone (which is related to the age of the quasar), (3) the mean density of the surrounding medium, and (4) xHI outside the proximity zone.”