Formation of the First Supermassive Black Holes

By Volker Bromm, Abraham Loeb. 2002

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We consider the physical conditions under which supermassive black holes could have formed inside the first galaxies. Our smoothed particle hydrodynamics simulations indicate that metal-free galaxies with a virial temperature of ~104 K and suppressed H2 formation (due to an intergalactic UV background) tend to form a binary black hole system that contains a substantial fraction (≳10%) of the total baryonic mass of the host galaxy. Fragmentation into stars is suppressed without substantial H2 cooling. Our simulations follow the condensation of ~5 × 106 M☉ around the two centers of the binary down to a scale of ≲0.1 pc. Low-spin galaxies form a single black hole instead. These early black holes lead to quasar activity before the epoch of reionization. Primordial black hole binaries lead to gravitational radiation emission at redshifts z ≳ 10 that would be detectable by Laser Interferometer Space Antenna.

Subfields: Astronomy and Astrophysics, Nuclear and High Energy Physics

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/bbd99f68ada94ef9f45657df632511eeda74fa32

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Citations in the corpus

Resolving the Formation of Protogalaxies. III. Feedback from the First Stars (2007, background): “Thus gas structures in the host halo are totally disrupted and expelled, effectively enriching the surrounding intergalactic medium (IGM) with the SN ejecta (Bromm & Loeb 2003; Kitayama & Yoshida 2005; Greif et al. 2007).”
Cosmological simulations of the growth of supermassive black holes and feedback from active galactic nuclei: method and tests (2009, background): “…et al. 2002; Islam, Tayloe & Silk 2003), and direct collapse of matter in high-redshift, low angular momentum haloes, which may give rise to seed BHs with masses ∼105 M (e.g. Loeb & Rasio 1994; Bromm & Loeb 2003; Begelman, Volonteri & Rees 2006; Dijkstra et al. 2008; Volonteri & Natarajan 2009).”
Can Supermassive Black Holes Form in Metal-enriched High-Redshift Protogalaxies? (2008, background): “This level of metallicity is approximately the same as the value at which the metal cooling rate exceeds the H2 cooling rate in clouds that are already collapsing by molecular cooling (Bromm & Loeb 2003b; Santoro & Shull 2006; Frebel et al. 2007).”
THE ASSEMBLY OF SUPERMASSIVE BLACK HOLES AT HIGH REDSHIFTS (2008, background): “…is the so-called “direct-collapse” model, wherein BHs with m ∼ 104–6 M are formed rapidly from gas cooling via atomic H in halos with virial temperature T 104 K (Oh & Haiman 2002; Bromm & Loeb 2003; Volonteri & Rees 2005; Begelman et al. 2006; Spaans & Silk 2006; Lodato & Natarajan 2006).”
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).”
Hyper-Eddington accretion flows on to massive black holes (2015, background): “…star collapses by general relativistic instability and turns to a massive seed BH with mass of & 105 M⊙ (Loeb & Rasio 1994; Oh & Haiman 2002; Bromm & Loeb 2003; Lodato & Natarajan 2006; Begelman, Volonteri & Rees 2006; Regan, Johansson & Haehnelt 2014; Inayoshi, Omukai & Tasker 2014;…”
Evolution of supermassive stars as a pathway to black hole formation (2009, background): “Despite early suggestions that fragmentation is avoidable only if the gas temperature remains close to the virial temperature (Bromm & Loeb 2003; Begelman, Volonteri & Rees 2006) – and thus only in systems lacking both metals and molecular hydrogen – recent simulations suggest that fragmentation…”
Ubiquitous seeding of supermassive black holes by direct collapse (2012, background): “5) which is very close to the expected value during the reionization era4 (Omukai 2001; Bromm & Loeb 2003).”
Pathways to massive black holes and compact star clusters in pre-galactic dark matter haloes with virial temperatures ≳10 000 K (2008, background): “Omukai & Nishi (1999), Glover & Brand (2001), Oh & Haiman (2002), Bromm & Loeb (2003) and Dijkstra et al. (2008) have all discussed in considerable detail H2 formation and dissociation in haloes similar to the ones we have simulated here.”
Formation of supermassive black holes by direct collapse in pre-galactic haloes (2006, background): “We suggest that inflow is most efficient in halos where Tvir does not exceed a few times 104 K, since fragmentation of the c© 0000 RAS, MNRAS 000, 000–000 infalling gas is unlikely to be efficient in this case (Bromm & Loeb 2003).”
Observational evidence for intermediate-mass black holes (2017, background): “IMBHs could also form inside the first metal-free (or very metal-poor) protogalaxies by direct collapse of rapidly inflowing dense gas (e.g., Loeb & Rasio 1994; Eisenstein & Loeb 1995; Bromm & Loeb 2003; Lodato & Natarajan 2006).”
The First Stars (2003, unknown): “(Adapted from Bromm & Loeb 2003c.) could lie in the unusually high abundances of carbon and oxygen in HE01075240.”
Thermal and Fragmentation Properties of Star-forming Clouds in Low-Metallicity Environments (2005, background): “Even in this case, if extremely strong UV field is present, photodissociation might lead to low-mass star formation by atomic cooling (Omukai & Yoshii 2003), although Bromm & Loeb (2003b) argue an alternative possibility that a supermassive object is the likely outcome for the atomic-cooling cloud.”
The First Cosmic Structures and Their Effects (2004, background): “This critical threshold is almost two orders of magnitude lower than that found by Bromm et al. (2001), and more recently by Bromm & Loeb (2003), because the fragmentation properties of a gas cloud with Z = Zcr depend on the fraction of metals depleted onto dust grains rather than on the metals…”
The aftermath of the first stars: massive black holes (2006, background): “It remains therefore an open question whether the SMBHs that power the z >∼ 6 quasars could have grown from stellar remnants, or whether more massive seed black holes were required (e.g. Bromm & Loeb 2003; Lodato & Natarajan 2006).”
Doing Science with eLISA: Astrophysics and Cosmology in the Millihertz Regime (2012, background): “…is suppressed possibly by turbulence and by an intense ultraviolet background light, in an environment of low metallicity (Begelman et al., 2006, Bromm and Loeb, 2003, Dijkstra et al., 2008, Dotan et al., 2011, Haehnelt and Rees, 1993, Koushiappas et al., 2004, Lodato and Natarajan, 2006, Loeb…”
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): “The gas temperature T depends crucially on whether H2 cooling is efficient: T ≈ 100 K, achievable if H2 cooling is efficient, would imply MJ ≈ 10 3 M⊙, so that PopIII stars might form, whereas T ≈ 104 K, expected in the absence of H2, would yield MJ ≈ 10 6 M⊙, suggesting that direct collapse into a ”
Population III Star Formation in a ΛCDM Universe. I. The Effect of Formation Redshift and Environment on Protostellar Accretion Rate (2006, background): “In addition, in this paper we do not concern ourselves with halos with virial temperatures above 104 K, where cooling by atomic hydrogen could be important (Oh & Haiman 2002; Bromm & Loeb 2003).”