The brief era of direct collapse black hole formation

Abstract

It has been proposed that the first, intermediate-mass ($\approx 10^{5-6}{M}_{\odot }$) black holes might form through direct collapse of unpolluted gas in atomic-cooling halos exposed to a strong Lyman-Werner (LW) or near-infrared (NIR) radiation. As these systems are expected to be Compton-thick, photons above 13.6 eV are largely absorbed and re-processed into lower energy bands. It follows that direct collapse black holes (DCBHs) are very bright in the LW/NIR bands, typically outshining small high-redshift galaxies by more than 10 times. Once the first DCBHs form, they then trigger a runaway process of further DCBH formation, producing a sudden rise in their cosmic mass density. The universe enters the "DCBH era" at $z\approx 20$ when a large fraction of atomic-cooling halos are experiencing DCBH formation. By combining the clustering properties of the radiation sources with Monte Carlo simulations we show that in this scenario the DCBH mass density rises from $\sim 5$~$M_{\odot }$ Mpc${}^{-3}$ at $z\sim 30$ to the peak value $\sim 5\times 10^5{M}_{\odot }$ Mpc${}^{-3}$ at $z\sim 14$ in our fiducial model. However, the abundance of \textit{active} (accreting) DCBHs drops after $z\sim 14$, as gas in the potential formation sites (unpolluted halos with virial temperature slightly above $10^4$~K) is photoevaporated. This effect almost completely suppresses DCBH formation after $z\sim 13$. The DCBH formation era lasts only $\approx 150$ Myr, but it might crucially provide the seeds of the supermassive black holes (SMBHs) powering $z\sim 6$ quasars.

26 pages, 4 figures, 2 tables. Accepted for publication in MNRAS

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Cited by in corpus (56)

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• A UV flux constraint on the formation of direct collapse black holes
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• The Formation of Intermediate Mass Black Holes in Galactic Nuclei
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• The Brightest Ly$\alpha$ Emitter: Pop III or Black Hole?
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• Witnessing the birth of a supermassive protostar
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• Radiation Hydrodynamical Simulations of the First Quasars
• The formation of massive primordial stars in the presence of moderate UV backgrounds
• Chasing the observational signatures of seed black holes at z > 7: candidate statistics
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• The impact of reionization on the formation of supermassive black hole seeds
• Faint progenitors of luminous $z\sim 6$ quasars: why don't we see them?
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• The nature of the Lyman Alpha Emitter CR7: a persisting puzzle
• On the Physical Requirements for a Pre-Reionization Origin of the Unresolved Near-Infrared Background
• Direct collapse to supermassive black hole seeds: the critical conditions for suppression of ${\mathrm{H}}_2$ cooling
• Bulge-driven Fueling of Seed Black Holes
• The Collapse of Atomically-Cooled Primordial Haloes. I. High Lyman-Werner Backgrounds
• Finding Direct-Collapse Black Holes at Birth
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• Massive Black Hole Science with eLISA
• Cross-correlation between X-ray and optical/near-infrared background intensity fluctuations
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• Cosmic Near-infrared Background Tomography with SPHEREx Using Galaxy Cross-correlations
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• The Mass Function of Supermassive Black Holes in the Direct-collapse Scenario
• Radiation-driven turbulent accretion onto massive black holes
• Cross-Correlation of Near and Far-Infrared Background Anisotropies as Traced by Spitzer and Herschel
• Triggering the formation of direct collapse black holes by their congeners
• Supermassive black hole seeds from sub-keV dark matter
• Extreme Primordial Star Formation Enabled by High Redshift Quasars
• Predictions for LISA and PTA based on SHARK galaxy simulations
• Gravitational Waves from Direct Collapse Black Holes Formation
• Near-infrared Extragalactic Background Light Fluctuations on Nonlinear Scales
• Structure of the super-Eddington outflow and itsimpact on the cosmological scale
• Biconical-dominated Accretion Flow onto Seed Black Holes in a Hyper-accretion Regime
• Massive black holes in high-redshift Lyman Break Galaxies
• Radio recombination lines from obscured quasars with the SKA
• Accelerated growth of seed black holes by dust in the early universe
• Detecting high-$z$ galaxies in the Near Infrared Background
• Detection of Tidal Disruption Events around Direct Collapse Black Holes at High Redshifts with the James Webb Space Telescope
• Direct Collapse to Precursors of Supermassive Black Hole Seeds:Radiation-feedback-generated Outflows
• Quasar clustering at redshift 6