Blossoms from black hole seeds: properties and early growth regulated by supernova feedback

By M. Habouzit, M. Volonteri, Y. Dubois. 2016

150 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Massive black holes (BHs) inhabit local galaxies, including the Milky Way and some dwarf galaxies. BH formation, occurring at early cosmic times, must account for the properties of BHs in today's galaxies, notably why some galaxies host a BH, and others do not. We investigate the formation, distribution and growth of BH `seeds' by using the adaptive mesh refinement code Ramses. We develop an implementation of BH formation in dense, low-metallicity environments, as advocated by models invoking the collapse of the first generation of stars, or of dense nuclear star clusters. The seed masses are computed one-by-one on-the-fly, based on the star formation rate and the stellar initial mass function. This self-consistent method to seed BHs allows us to study the distribution of BHs in a cosmological context and their evolution over cosmic time. We find that all high-mass galaxies tend to a host a BH, whereas low-mass counterparts have a lower probability of hosting a BH. After the end of the epoch of BH formation, this probability is modulated by the growth of the galaxy. The simulated BHs connect to low-redshift observational samples, and span a similar range in accretion properties as Lyman-Break Analogs. The growth of BHs in low-mass galaxies is stunted by strong supernova feedback. The properties of BHs in dwarf galaxies thus remain a testbed for BH formation. Simulations with strong supernova feedback, which is able to quench BH accretion in shallow potential wells, produce galaxies and BHs in better agreement with observational constraints.

Subfields: Astronomy and Astrophysics

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/f8a52a2dbff15a87c39a61619270084b5c126ddb

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Citations in the corpus

Unveiling the gravitational universe at μ-Hz frequencies (2019, background): “mass stage are typically well-developed 10(11)–10(12) M⊙ galaxies [126], whereas in the “direct collapse” models, the heavy seeds form in 10(7)–10(8) M⊙ DM halos, which, after an order of magnitude growth in BH mass, still typically remain < 10(9) M⊙ sized dwarf galaxies [273].”
Titans of the early Universe: The Prato statement on the origin of the first supermassive black holes (2018, background): “Habouzit et al. (2017) perform a comparison between the pSAM study of Dijkstra et al. (2014) and a variety of hSAMs (Agarwal et al. 2012; Agarwal et al. 2014; Habouzit et al. 2016b), and find that Dijkstra et al. (2014) overestimates the stellar mass in halos.”
A New Sample of (Wandering) Massive Black Holes in Dwarf Galaxies from High-resolution Radio Observations (2019, background): “Recent simulations also suggest that dwarfs should contain relatively pristine BHs, due to supernova feedback stunting BH growth (Anglés-Alcázar et al. 2017; Habouzit et al. 2017).”
Supermassive black holes and their feedback effects in the IllustrisTNG simulation (2017, background): “It has been shown in a number of studies (Dubois et al. 2014b; Volonteri et al. 2016; Anglés-Alcázar et al. 2017a; Habouzit et al. 2017) that stellar feedback can have a large impact on the accretion rates of SMBHs.”
simba: Cosmological simulations with black hole growth and feedback (2019, result): “A qualitatively similar effect was also found in EAGLE (Bower et al. 2017; McAlpine et al. 2018) and Ramses-based simulations (Dubois et al. 2015; Habouzit et al. 2017), though their use of Bondi accretion may inhibit the growth of low mass black holes even in the absence of resolved stellar…”
The Romulus cosmological simulations: a physical approach to the formation, dynamics and accretion models of SMBHs (2016, methodology): “…stochastic formation from star forming gas, resulting in seed formation that occurs in environments that are different than the average © 2015 RAS, MNRAS 000, 1–21 unenriched star forming region, as seen in higher resolution tests of SMBH formation sites (Agarwal et al. 2014; Habouzit et al. 2017).”