Bright vigorous winds as signposts of supermassive black hole birth

Abstract

The formation of supermassive black holes is still an outstanding question. In the quasi-star scenario, black hole seeds experience an initial super-Eddington growth, that in less than a million years may leave a $10^4-10^5$ M${}_{\odot }$ black hole at the centre of a protogalaxy at $z\sim 20-10$. Super-Eddington accretion, however, may be accompanied by vigorous mass loss that can limit the amount of mass that reaches the black hole. In this paper, we critically assess the impact of radiative driven winds, launched from the surface of the massive envelopes from which the black hole accretes. Solving the full wind equations coupled with the hydrostatic structure of the envelope, we find mass outflows with rates between a few tens and $10^4$ M${}_{\odot }$ yr${}^{-1}$, mainly powered by advection luminosity within the outflow. We therefore confirm the claim by Dotan, Rossi & Shaviv (2011) that mass losses can severely affect the black hole seed early growth within a quasi-star. In particular, seeds with mass $>10^4$ M${}_{\odot }$ can only form within mass reservoirs $\gtrsim 10^7$ M${}_{\odot }$, unless they are refilled at huge rates ($\gtrsim 100$ M${}_{\odot }$ yr${}^{-1}$). This may imply that only very massive halos ($>10^9$ M${}_{\odot }$) at those redshifts can harbour massive seeds. Contrary to previous claims, these winds are expected to be relatively bright ($10^{44}-10^{47}$ erg s${}^{-1}$), blue ($T_{\mathrm{eff}}\sim 8000$ K) objects, that while eluding the Hubble Space Telescope, could be observed by the James Webb Space Telescope.

15 pages, 8 figures, accepted for publication in MNRAS

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Cited by in corpus (15)

• Titans of the Early Universe: The Prato Statement on the Origin of the First Supermassive Black Holes
• Formation of supermassive black hole seeds
• Improved Dynamical Constraints on the Masses of the Central Black Holes in Nearby Low-mass Early-type Galactic Nuclei And the First Black Hole Determination for NGC 205
• The hierarchical assembly of galaxies and black holes in the first billion years: predictions for the era of gravitational wave astronomy
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• The Early Growth of the First Black Holes
• The MBHBM* Project -- I: Measurement of the Central Black Hole Mass in Dwarf Galaxy NGC 3504 Using Molecular Gas Kinematics
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• Effects of proper motion of neutron stars on continuous gravitational-wave searches
• Constraining the mass of accreting black holes in ultraluminous X-ray sources with ultrafast outflows
• Black hole formation via gas-dynamical processes