Quasars at z = 6: The Survival of the Fittest

By M. Volonteri, Martin J. Rees. 2006

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The Sloan Digital Sky Survey has detected luminous quasars at very high redshift, z > 6. Follow-up observations indicate that at least some of these quasars are powered by supermassive black holes (SMBHs), with masses in excess of 109 M☉. SMBHs, therefore, seem to have already existed when the universe was less than 1 Gyr old and the bulk of galaxy formation had yet to take place. Here we investigate the extent to which accretion and dynamical processes influence the early growth of SMBHs. We assess the impact of (1) black hole mergers, (2) the influence of the merger efficiency, and (3) the negative contribution due to dynamical effects, which can kick black holes out of their host halos (gravitational recoil). We find that if accretion is always limited by the Eddington rate via a thin disk, the maximum allowed radiative efficiency (or spin) to reproduce the luminosity function at z = 6 is ϵ = 0.12 (or = 0.8), against the adverse effect of the gravitational recoil. Dynamical effects unquestionably cannot be neglected in studies of high-redshift SMBHs. If black holes can accrete at a supercritical rate during an early phase, reproducing the observed SMBH mass values is not an issue, even in the case that the recoil velocity is in the upper limit range, as the mass ratios of merging binaries are skewed toward low values, where the gravitational recoil effect is very mild. We propose that SMBH growth at early times is very selective, and efficient only for black holes hosted in high density peak halos.

Subfields: Astronomy and Astrophysics, Instrumentation

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Citations in the corpus

A Recoiling Supermassive Black Hole in the Quasar SDSS J092712.65+294344.0? (2008, background): “…and BH growth in the early universe, and would give rise to a population of interstellar and intergalactic BHs (e.g., Madau et al. 2004, Merritt et al. 2004, Madau & Quataert 2004, Haiman 2004, Yoo & Miralda-Escudé 2004, Volonteri & Perna 2005, Volonteri & Rees 2006, Libeskind et al. 2006).”
A SURVEY OF z ∼ 6 QUASARS IN THE SLOAN DIGITAL SKY SURVEY DEEP STRIPE. I. A FLUX-LIMITED SAMPLE AT zAB < 21 (2007, background): “The QLF at z ∼ 6 is important to understand BH growth at early epochs (e.g. Volonteri & Rees 2006; Wyithe & Padmanabhan 2006).”
The aftermath of the first stars: massive black holes (2006, background): “…holes must have been rapid enough to account for the powerful quasars observed at redshifts of z >∼ 6 (e.g. Fan et al. 2004, 2006), believed to be fueled by accretion onto supermassive black holes (SMBHs) with masses ∼ 109 M⊙ (e.g. Haiman & Loeb 2001; Volonteri & Rees 2005; Volonteri & Rees 2006).”
Direct Cosmological Simulations of the Growth of Black Holes and Galaxies (2007, unknown): “As we shall see, mildly supercritical conditions are generally achieved at high redshift, consistent with the models of Volonteri & Rees (2006) and Begelman et al. (2006), in this way helping the fast build-up of high-redshift quasars.”
Formation of z~6 Quasars from Hierarchical Galaxy Mergers (2006, result): “Our approach differs from previous semianalytic studies by Haiman & Loeb (2001), Haiman (2004), Yoo & Miralda-Escudé (2004), and Volonteri & Rees (2005, 2006) in the following ways: 1.”
Fluctuations in the high-redshift Lyman–Werner background: close halo pairs as the origin of supermassive black holes (2008, background): “…and mergers, starting from stellar–mass seed BHs left behind by the first generation of stars (e.g. Haiman & Loeb 2001; Haiman 2004; Yoo & Miralda-Escudé 2004; Bromley, Somerville & Fabian 2004; Shapiro 2005; Volonteri & Rees 2006; Li et al. 2007; Johnson & Bromm 2007; Tanaka & Haiman 2008).”
FORMATION OF THE FIRST NUCLEAR CLUSTERS AND MASSIVE BLACK HOLES AT HIGH REDSHIFT (2008, background): “Alternative routes to BH seed formation have been explored (Haehnelt & Rees 1993, Loeb & Rasio 1994, Eisenstein & Loeb 1995, Bromm & Loeb 2003, Koushiappas et al. 2004, Begelman, Volonteri & Rees 2006, Lodato & Natarajan 2006), typically exploiting gas-dynamical processes in metal-free galaxies.”
THE ASSEMBLY OF SUPERMASSIVE BLACK HOLES AT HIGH REDSHIFTS (2008, background): “…(Bromley et al. 2004) or which include a distribution of kick velocities extending to low values (e.g., Yoo & Miralda-Escudé 2004 (hereafter YM04); Volonteri & Rees 2006 (hereafter VR06)) give a slightly more optimistic picture, showing that if seed BHs form in most minihalos in the early…”
The imprint of massive black hole formation models on the LISA data stream (2007, methodology): “If instead there is no gas readily available, the binary will be losing orbital energy to the stars, using the scheme described in Volonteri, Madau & Haardt (2003) and in Volonteri & Rees (2006).”
Supermassive black hole formation by direct collapse: keeping protogalactic gas H2 free in dark matter haloes with virial temperatures Tvir > rsim 104 K (2009, background): “Even if such disruptive kicks are avoided (because mergers at early times may be rare and/or occur primarily between unequal–mass BHs; Volonteri & Rees 2006; Tanaka & Haiman 2009), there remain two fundamental difficulties.”
Can Supermassive Black Holes Form in Metal-enriched High-Redshift Protogalaxies? (2008, background): “The repeated loss of the growing seeds makes it especially challenging to account for the several times 109M SMBHs at zk 6 without at least a brief phase of super-Eddington accretion, or some equivalent ‘‘head start’’ (Haiman 2004; Yoo & Miralda-Escudé 2004; Shapiro 2005; Volonteri & Rees 2006).”
The MassiveBlack-II simulation: The evolution of haloes and galaxies to z ~ 0 (2014, result): “Phys., 69, 3101 Begelman M. C., Volonteri M., Rees M. J., 2006, MNRAS, 370, 289 Bennert V. N., Treu T., Woo J.-H., Malkan M. A., Le Bris A., Auger M. W., Gallagher S., Blandford R. D., 2010, ApJ, 708, 1507 Bennert V. N., Auger M. W., Treu T., Woo J.-H., Malkan M. A., 2011, ApJ, 742, 107 Berlind A. A”
THE SDSS-III BARYON OSCILLATION SPECTROSCOPIC SURVEY: THE QUASAR LUMINOSITY FUNCTION FROM DATA RELEASE NINE (2012, background): “…QLF allows us to place constraints on the formation history of supermassive black holes (e.g., Rees 1984; Madau & Rees 2001; Volonteri et al. 2003; Volonteri & Rees 2006; Netzer & Trakhtenbrot 2007; Haiman 2012) and to map the black hole accretion history of the Universe via the black hole mass…”
Journey to the MBH-σ relation: the fate of low-mass black holes in the Universe (2009, background): “In the ‘heavy seeds’ scenario, massive seeds with M ≈ 105– 106 M can form at high redshift (z > 15), when the intergalactic medium has not been significantly enriched by metals (Koushiappas, Bullock & Dekel 2004; Begelman, Volonteri & Rees 2006; Lodato & Natarajan 2006, 2007).”
The first galaxies : assembly, cooling and the onset of turbulence (2008, methodology): “A more precise modelling would also require a prescription for radiation emitted by the BH-powered miniquasar and its feedback on the surrounding disc (Volonteri & Rees 2006).”
EDDINGTON-LIMITED ACCRETION AND THE BLACK HOLE MASS FUNCTION AT REDSHIFT 6 (2010, background): “Mergers are also an important part of the growth of the most massive black holes at high redshift (Volonteri & Rees 2006; Li et al. 2007).”
Gemini Near-Infrared Spectroscopy of Luminous z ∼ 6 Quasars: Chemical Abundances, Black Hole Masses, and Mg II Absorption (2007, background): “In addition, if Eddington-limited accretion is via standard thin disks, BHs are likely to be spun up and the radiative efficiency and Eddington timescale will increase (Volonteri & Rees 2006; Rees &Volonteri 2006).”
Formation of supermassive black holes (2010, background): “How could the seed massive black holes have grown rapidly enough within this short timespan is still an open question (e.g., Haiman, 2004; Shapiro, 2005; Volonteri and Rees, 2006; Tanaka and Haiman, 2009).”