COLD FLOWS AND THE FIRST QUASARS

By T. Di Matteo, Nishikanta Khandai, Colin Degraf, Yu Feng, Rupert A. C. Croft, Julio Lopez, Volker Springel. 2011

200 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Observations of the most distant bright quasars imply that billion solar mass supermassive black holes (SMBHs) have to be assembled within the first 800 million years. Under our standard galaxy formation scenario such fast growth implies large gas densities providing sustained accretion at critical or supercritical rates onto an initial black hole seed. It has been a long standing question whether and how such high black hole accretion rates can be achieved and sustained at the centers of early galaxies. Here we use our new MassiveBlack cosmological hydrodynamic simulation covering a volume (0.75 Gpc)3 appropriate for studying the rare first quasars to show that steady high density cold gas flows responsible for assembling the first galaxies produce the high gas densities that lead to sustained critical accretion rates and hence rapid growth commensurate with the existence of ∼109 M☉ black holes as early as z ∼ 7. We find that under these conditions quasar feedback is not effective at stopping the cold gas from penetrating the central regions and hence cannot quench the accretion until the host galaxy reaches . This cold-flow-driven scenario for the formation of quasars implies that they should be ubiquitous in galaxies in the early universe and that major (proto)galaxy mergers are not a requirement for efficient fuel supply and growth, particularly for the earliest SMBHs.

Subfields: Astronomy and Astrophysics, Instrumentation

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/e31d1dad8b6cbf3966e75c3cbadc92be852bb512

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Citations in the corpus

Moving mesh cosmology: the hydrodynamics of galaxy formation (2011, methodology): “We note that this standard formulation of SPH has also been typically employed in state-of-the-art cosmological SPH calculations (e.g. Crain et al. 2009; Di Matteo et al. 2012).”
Formation of Supermassive Black Hole Seeds (2016, background): “This may be achieved via prolonged episodes of accretion and/or merging in rare massive halos forming at earlier cosmic times as found in large cosmological simulations (Sijacki et al. 2007, 2015; Di Matteo et al. 2012, 2016).”
Cosmological simulations of black hole growth: AGN luminosities and downsizing (2013, methodology): “…achieved by e.g. semi-analytical or semi-empirical models, large cosmological, hydrodynamic simulations were performed by several recent studies (Di Matteo et al. 2008, 2012; McCarthy et al. 2010, 2011; Degraf, Di Matteo & Springel 2010, 2011; Booth & Schaye 2011; DeGraf et al. 2012; Haas et al.…”
The current status of galaxy formation (2012, background): “Large cosmological simulations (Di Matteo et al., 2012, see also Li et al., 2007; Sijacki et al., 2009; Khandai et al., 2012) have shown that primordial massive BHs can grow by cold filamentary infall, and acquire masses of up to several billion solar masses by z = 6 in the most massive halos (Mvir…”
STAR FORMATION AND GAS KINEMATICS OF QUASAR HOST GALAXIES AT z ∼ 6: NEW INSIGHTS FROM ALMA (2013, background): “15 Hubble Fellow. highest redshift suggests fast black hole accretion and significant SMBH-galaxy evolution within 1 Gyr after the big bang (Li et al. 2007; Narayanan et al. 2008; Di Matteo et al. 2012).”
Titans of the early Universe: The Prato statement on the origin of the first supermassive black holes (2018, background): “Past simulations have simply deposited this luminosity locally as heat (e.g., Di Matteo et al. 2012; Feng et al. 2014; Costa et al. 2014; Hirschmann et al. 2014) but the newest models now perform multi-frequency radiation transport from the black hole (Aykutalp et al. 2014; Smidt, Wiggins, &…”
The clustering of intermediate-redshift quasars as measured by the Baryon Oscillation Spectroscopic Survey (2012, background): “…Loeb 1998; Cattaneo, Haehnelt & Rees 1999; Kauffmann & Haehnelt 2000; Springel et al. 2005; Hopkins et al. 2006) or instability in a cold-stream fed disk (Ciotti & Ostriker 1997, 2001; Di Matteo et al. 2012)—triggers a period of rapid, obscured star formation and the generation of a stellar bulge.”
The MassiveBlack-II simulation: The evolution of haloes and galaxies to z ~ 0 (2014, methodology): “We have run one such simulation as part of the NSF Petascale applications in cosmology programme, using the code P-GADGET (see e.g. Di Matteo et al. 2012).”
Blossoms from black hole seeds: properties and early growth regulated by supernova feedback (2016, background): “In most cosmological simulations, BHs with mass ∼ 104 − 105 M are seeded in haloes above a fixed mass threshold, typically Mh ∼ 1010 M (e.g. Sijacki, Springel & Haehnelt 2009; Di Matteo et al. 2012; Hirschmann et al. 2012; Sijacki et al. 2015).”
THE SDSS-III BARYON OSCILLATION SPECTROSCOPIC SURVEY: THE QUASAR LUMINOSITY FUNCTION FROM DATA RELEASE NINE (2012, methodology): “The shaded region in the bright end QLF represents an estimate for the cosmic variance using a larger volume simulation (“MassiveBlack”, see DeGraf et al. 2012; Di Matteo et al. 2012).”
THE z = 5 QUASAR LUMINOSITY FUNCTION FROM SDSS STRIPE 82 (2012, background): “Alternatively, some hydrodynamical simulations point to rapid inflows of cold gas along filamentary structures in the cosmic web as the primary fueling mechanism at high redshift (e.g., Di Matteo et al. 2012).”