ACCRETION ONTO THE FIRST STELLAR-MASS BLACK HOLES

By M. Alvarez, John H. Wise, Tom Abel. 2007

217 citations recorded by the source corpus.

The first stars, forming at redshifts z > 15 in minihalos with M ∼ 105–6 M☉ may leave behind remnant black holes, which could conceivably have been the “seeds” for the supermassive black holes observed at z ≲ 7. We study remnant black hole growth through accretion, including for the first time the radiation emitted due to accretion, with adaptive mesh refinement cosmological radiation–hydrodynamical simulations. The effects of photoionization and heating dramatically affect the large-scale inflow, resulting in negligible mass growth. We compare cases with accretion luminosity included and neglected to show that accretion radiation drastically changes the environment within 100 pc of the black hole, increasing gas temperatures by an order of magnitude. Gas densities are reduced and further star formation in the same minihalo is prevented for the 200 million years we followed. Without radiative feedback included most seed black holes do not gain mass as efficiently as has been hoped for in previous theories, implying that black hole remnants of population III stars in minihalos are not likely to be miniquasars. Most importantly, however, our calculations demonstrate that if these black holes are indeed accreting close to the Bondi–Hoyle rate with 10% radiative efficiency they have a dramatic local effect in regulating star formation in the first galaxies. This suggests a novel mechanism for massive black hole formation—stellar-mass black holes may have suppressed fragmentation and star formation after falling into halos with virial temperatures ∼104 K, facilitating massive black hole formation at their centers.

Subfields: Astronomy and Astrophysics, Atomic and Molecular Physics, and Optics

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/fc8c41e26936ab09bbed5657b90939433511dd1e

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Citations in the corpus

Formation of Supermassive Black Hole Seeds (2016, background): “The three dimensional numerical simulations studying the growth of stellar mass BHs show that feedback PASA (2016) doi:10.1017/pas.2016.xxx from a BH photo-evaporates the gas the in its hosting halo and consequently accretion onto a BH gets halted (Johnson & Bromm 2007; Alvarez et al. 2009).”
GALAXY PROPERTIES AND UV ESCAPE FRACTIONS DURING THE EPOCH OF REIONIZATION: RESULTS FROM THE RENAISSANCE SIMULATIONS (2016, background): “Subsequent supernova feedback only exacerbate the ISM porosity and the magnitude of the outflows, creating extremely gas-poor halos, as seen in the fgas panels of Figures 11–13.”
Physical Properties of 15 Quasars at z ≳ 6.5 (2017, background): “…of massive gaseous reservoirs (e.g., Haehnelt & Rees 1993, Latif & Schleicher 2015), the collapse of Population III stars (e.g., Bond et al. 1984, Alvarez et al. 2009, Valiante et al. 2016), the co-action of dynamical processes, gas collapse and star formation (e.g., Devecchi & Volonteri 2009),…”
Ubiquitous seeding of supermassive black holes by direct collapse (2012, background): “Both the radiation from the Pop III progenitor star (e.g. Yoshida 2006; Johnson & Bromm 2007; Alvarez et al. 2009) and the radiation emitted in the accretion process itself (e.g. Milosavljević et al. 2009; Park & Ricotti 2011; Li 2011), result in feedback which might slow down gas accretion.”
FEEDBACK FROM CENTRAL BLACK HOLES IN ELLIPTICAL GALAXIES: TWO-DIMENSIONAL MODELS COMPARED TO ONE-DIMENSIONAL MODELS (2010, methodology): “Our goal is to resolve both the relevant accretion length and timescales while at the same time resolving galactic length and timescales (cf. Levine et al. 2008; Alvarez et al. 2009).”
What drives the growth of black holes (2011, background): “Radiative feedback limits the possible accretion rates onto seed stellar-mass BHs (e.g., Johnson & Bromm, 2007; Alvarez et al., 2009), making it difficult to construct mechanisms by which such BH seeds can achive the high accretion rates required to produce the high-mass quasars observed at z & 6…”
Evidence for heavy-seed origin of early supermassive black holes from a z ≈ 10 X-ray quasar (2023, background): “Numerical studies[40, 41], including the state-of-the-art Renaissance simulation suite, demonstrate that this is likely infeasible given the spatial location of light seeds given their Population III origin.”
Stellar black holes at the dawn of the universe (2011, background): “However, feedback from Bondi-Hoyle accretion to solitary black holes significantly suppresses both any further inflow (Alvarez et al. 2009; Milosavljevic et al. 2009) and the consequent injection of radiation and high-energy particles to the surrounding medium.”
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): “First, the early seeds must accrete near the Eddington rate for a Hubble time, without any prolonged interruption (Haiman & Loeb 2001), which requires that the BHs are continuously surrounded by dense gas (e.g. Turner 1991; Alvarez et al 2009).”
SUPER-CRITICAL GROWTH OF MASSIVE BLACK HOLES FROM STELLAR-MASS SEEDS (2014, background): “…low-mass dark matter halos, as feedback effects resulting from the accretion process itself are expected to dramatically affect gas inflow and may result in sub-Eddington rates and negligible mass growth (Johnson & Bromm 2007; Pelupessy et al. 2007; Alvarez et al. 2009; Milosavljevic et al. 2009).”