Can supermassive black hole seeds form in galaxy mergers?

Abstract

It has been recently suggested that supermassive black holes at z = 5-6 might form from super-fast (\dot M > 10^4 Msun/yr) accretion occurring in unstable, massive nuclear gas disks produced by mergers of Milky-Way size galaxies. Interestingly, such mechanism is claimed to work also for gas enriched to solar metallicity. These results are based on an idealized polytropic equation of state assumption, essentially preventing the gas from cooling. We show that under more realistic conditions, the disk rapidly (< 1 yr) cools, the accretion rate drops, and the central core can grow only to \approx 100 Msun. In addition, most of the disk becomes gravitationally unstable in about 100 yr, further quenching the accretion. We conclude that this scenario encounters a number of difficulties that possibly make it untenable.

MNRAS Letter. 6 pages, 3 Figures. Comments welcome

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• When Feedback Fails: The Scaling and Saturation of Star Formation Efficiency
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• Initial mass function of intermediate mass black hole seeds
• X-ray constraints on the local supermassive black hole occupation fraction
• Constraining the high redshift formation of black hole seeds in nuclear star clusters with gas inflows
• Growing massive black holes through super-critical accretion of stellar-mass seeds
• The MAVERIC Survey: Still No Evidence for Accreting Intermediate-mass Black Holes in Globular Clusters
• Direct formation of supermassive black holes in metal-enriched gas at the heart of high-redshift galaxy mergers
• The route to massive black hole formation via merger-driven direct collapse: a review
• The brief era of direct collapse black hole formation
• Looking at cosmic near-infrared background radiation anisotropies
• The suppression of direct collapse black hole formation by soft X-ray irradiation
• New observational Constraints on the Growth of the First Supermassive Black Holes
• The Early Growth of the First Black Holes
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• The role of stellar relaxation in the formation and evolution of the first massive black holes
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• Triggering the formation of direct collapse black holes by their congeners
• The chemical evolution of self-gravitating primordial disks
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