Supermassive Black Holes in the Early Universe

Abstract

The recent discovery of the ultraluminous quasar SDSS J010013.02+280225.8 at redshift 6.3 has exacerbated the time compression problem implied by the appearance of supermassive black holes only ~900 Myr after the big bang, and only ~500 Myr beyond the formation of Pop II and III stars. Aside from heralding the onset of cosmic reionization, these first and second generation stars could have reasonably produced the ~5-20 solar-mass seeds that eventually grew into z~6-7 quasars. But this process would have taken ~900 Myr, a timeline that appears to be at odds with the predictions of LCDM without an anomalously high accretion rate, or some exotic creation of ~10^5 solar-mass seeds. There is no evidence of either of these happening in the local universe. In this paper, we show that a much simpler, more elegant solution to the supermassive black hole anomaly is instead to view this process using the age-redshift relation predicted by the R_h=ct Universe, an FRW cosmology with zero active mass. In this context, cosmic reionization lasted from t~883 Myr to ~2 Gyr (z~15 to z~6), so ~5-20 solar-mass black hole seeds formed shortly after reionization had begun, would have evolved into ~10^10 solar-mass quasars by z~6-7 simply via the standard Eddington-limited accretion rate. The consistency of these observations with the age-redshift relationship predicted by R_h=ct supports the existence of dark energy; but not in the form of a cosmological constant.

10 Pages, 2 Figures, 1 Table. Accepted for publication in Proc. R. Soc. A

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• Massive and supermassive black holes in the contemporary and early universe and the new problems of cosmology and astrophysics
• Cosmological test using the Hubble diagram of high-z quasars
• Definitive Test of the R_h=ct Universe Using Redshift Drift
• Cosmological Tests of Everpresent $\Lambda$
• A Cosmological Solution to the Impossibly Early Galaxy Problem
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• The Scale of Homogeneity in the $R_h=ct$ Universe
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• Unseen Progenitors of Luminous High-z Quasars in the R_h=ct Universe
• An investigation on gravitational entropy of cosmological models
• Model Selection based on the Angular-Diameter Distance to the Compact Structure in Radio Quasars
• Tantalizing New Physics from the Cosmic Purview
• $f(R)$ gravity in the solar system and cosmological scalarons
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• Cosmological test using the high-redshift detection rate of FSRQs with the Square Kilometer Array
• The Galactic Pizza: Flat Rotation Curves in the Context of Cosmological Time-Energy Coupling