The Assembly of the First Massive Black Holes

Abstract

The existence of $\approx$10^9 Msun supermassive black holes (SMBHs) within the first billion year of the universe has stimulated numerous ideas for the prompt formation and rapid growth of BHs in the early universe. Here we review ways in which the seeds of massive BHs may have first assembled, how they may have subsequently grown as massive as $\approx$10^9 Msun, and how multi-messenger observations could distinguish between different SMBH assembly scenarios. We conclude the following: (1) The ultra-rare $\approx$10^9 Msun SMBHs represent only the tip of the iceberg. Early BHs likely fill a continuum from stellar-mass (approx. 10 Msun) to the super-massive ($\approx$10^9 Msun) regime, reflecting a range of initial masses and growth histories. (2) Stellar-mass BHs were likely left behind by the first generation of stars at redshifts as high as z=30, but their initial growth was typically stunted due to the shallow potential wells of their host galaxies. (3) Conditions in some larger, metal-poor galaxies soon became conducive to the rapid formation and growth of massive `seed' holes, via gas accretion and by mergers in dense stellar clusters. (4) BH masses depend on the environment (such as the number and properties of nearby radiation sources and the local baryonic streaming velocity), and on the metal enrichment and assembly history of the host galaxy. (5) Distinguishing between assembly mechanisms will be difficult, but a combination of observations by LISA (probing massive BH growth via mergers) and by deep multi-wavelength electromagnetic observations (probing growth via gas accretion) is particularly promising.

Invited review in Annual Reviews of Astronomy & Astrophysics; an edited final version is to appear in volume 58, to be published in 2020

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• Probing quasar lifetimes with proximate $21$-centimetre absorption in the diffuse intergalactic medium at redshifts $z\ge 6$
• The ALPINE-CRISTAL-JWST Survey: Revealing Less Massive Black Holes in High-Redshift Galaxies
• ALMA 300 pc resolution imaging of a z=6.79 quasar: no evidence for supermassive black hole influence on the [C II] kinematics
• SHELLQs-JWST Unveils the Host Galaxies of 12 Quasars at z>6
• Rapid Growth of Galactic Supermassive Black Holes through Accreting Giant Molecular Clouds during Major Mergers of their Host Galaxies
• Constraining the Low-Mass End of the Black Hole Mass Function and the Active Fraction of the Intermediate-mass Black Holes
• Active galactic nuclei-heated dust revealed in "little red dots"
• Ultra-high energy neutrinos from high-redshift electromagnetic cascades
• X-ray and radio observations of central black holes in nearby low-mass early-type galaxies: Preliminary evidence for low Eddington fractions
• Refining the mass estimate for the intermediate-mass black hole candidate in NGC 3319
• Magnetic Effects Promote Supermassive Star Formation in Metal-enriched Atomic-cooling Halos
• Discovery and characterization of 25 new quasars at 4.6 < z < 6.9 from wide-field multi-band surveys
• Finding of a population of active galactic nuclei showing a significant luminosity decline in the past $\sim 10^{3-4}$ yrs
• Predictions for LISA and PTA based on SHARK galaxy simulations
• Probing helium reionization with kinetic Sunyaev Zel'dovich tomography
• An empirical approach to selecting the first growing black hole seeds with JWST/NIRCam
• Maximal X-ray feedback in the pre-reionization universe
• Accretion onto supermassive and intermediate mass black holes in cosmological simulations
• Black hole virial masses from single-epoch photometry: the miniJPAS test case
• Selection of powerful radio galaxies with machine learning
• Black holes at cosmic dawn in the redshifted 21cm signal of HI
• Early formation of supermassive black holes from the collapse of strongly self-interacting dark matter
• Tracing Astrophysical Black Hole Seeds and Primordial Black Holes with LISA-Taiji Network
• Detection of the [O I] 63 $\mu$m emission line from the $z=6.04$ quasar J2054-0005
• Accretion from Winds of Red Giant Branch Stars May Reveal the Supermassive Black Hole in Leo I
• Feedback-regulated Seed Black Hole Growth in Star-Forming Molecular Clouds and Galactic Nuclei
• Extreme Tidal Stripping May Explain the Overmassive Black Hole in Leo I: a Proof of Concept
• What powers galactic outflows: nuclear starbursts or AGN?
• Radiation hydrodynamics simulations of line-driven AGN disc winds: metallicity dependence and black hole growth
• Is GN-z11 powered by a super-Eddington massive black hole?
• Detectability of Supermassive Dark Stars with the Roman Space Telescope
• Connecting the Dots: UV-Bright Companions of Little Red Dots as Lyman-Werner Sources Enabling Direct Collapse Black Hole Formation
• Dwarf AGNs from Variability for the Origins of Seeds (DAVOS): Optical Variability of Broad-line Dwarf AGNs from the Zwicky Transient Facility
• Systematic biases from ignoring environmental tidal effects in gravitational wave observations
• Optical Continuum Reverberation Mapping of a Candidate IMBH in a Nearby Seyfert 1 Galaxy
• Effects of the Hubble Parameter on the Cosmic Growth of the First Quasars
• Unresolved z~8 point sources and their impact on the bright end of the galaxy luminosity function
• Overmassive black holes in the early Universe can be explained by gas-rich, dark matter-dominated galaxies
• Dynamics of intermediate mass black holes in globular clusters. Wander radius and anisotropy profiles
• Population III star formation in the presence of turbulence, magnetic fields and ionizing radiation feedback
• Rotating Supermassive Pop III Stars On The Main Sequence
• Optical and near-infrared spectroscopy of quasars at $z>6.5$: public data release and composite spectrum
• The Success of Optical Variability in Uncovering AGNs in Low-stellar Mass Galaxies
• Primordial Black-Hole-Based Pathways to Little Red Dots
• A Closer Look at Two of the Most Luminous Quasars in the Universe
• Structure of the super-Eddington outflow and itsimpact on the cosmological scale
• When Spectral Modeling Meets Convolutional Networks: A Method for Discovering Reionization-era Lensed Quasars in Multi-band Imaging Data
• HYPERION: broad-band X-ray-to-near-infrared emission of Quasars in the first billion years of the Universe
• Massive black holes in high-redshift Lyman Break Galaxies
• Photometric IGM Tomography: Efficiently Mapping Quasar Light Echoes with Deep Narrow Band Imaging
• Hungry or Not: How Stellar-Mass Black Holes Grow (or Don't) in Dark Matter Mini-Haloes at High-Resolution
• WISE2MBH: A scaling-based algorithm for probing supermassive black hole masses through WISE catalogues
• Overdensity of Lyman-Break Galaxy Candidates Around Hot Dust-Obscured Galaxies
• HYPERION. Shedding light on the first luminous quasars: A correlation between UV disc winds and X-ray continuum
• FNet II: Spectral Classification of Quasars, Galaxies, Stars, and broad absorption line (BAL) Quasars
• Climbing out of the shadows: building the distance ladder with black hole images
• Astrophysics with the Laser Interferometer Space Antenna
• AGNet: Weighing Black Holes with Deep Learning
• A Chandra Survey of Milky Way Globular Clusters. III. Searching for X-ray Signature of Intermediate-mass Black Holes
• Revealing faint compact radio jets at redshifts above 5 with very long baseline interferometry
• Cosmological probes of helium reionization
• Suppression of H2-cooling in protogalaxies aided by trapped Lyα cooling radiation
• Fading Light, Fierce Winds: JWST Snapshot of a Sub-Eddington Quasar at Cosmic Dawn
• Unravelling the formation of the first supermassive black holes with the SKA pulsar timing array
• Can supermassive stars form in protogalaxies due to internal Lyman-Werner feedback?
• Probing the He II re-Ionization ERa via Absorbing C IV Historical Yield (HIERACHY) I: A Strong Outflow from a z~4.7 Quasar
• Premature supermassive black hole mergers in cosmological simulations of structure formation
• Black Hole Scaling Relations in the Dwarf-galaxy Regime with $Gaia$-Sausage/Enceladus and $\omega$Centauri
• The Noctua Suite of Simulations -- The Difficulty of Growing Massive Black Holes in Low-Mass Dwarf Galaxies
• Dating N loud AGNs at high redshift: GS3073 as a snapshot of wCen like evolution of a nuclear star cluster
• Constraining primordial black hole masses through $f(R)$ gravity scalarons in Big Bang Nucleosynthesis
• Exploring Dark Forces with Multimessenger Studies of Extreme Mass Ratio Inspirals
• Quasar lifetime measurements from extended Ly$\alpha$ nebulae at $z\sim 6$
• The Dawn of Black Holes
• Reconstructing patchy helium reionization using the cosmic microwave background and large-scale structure
• The impact of large-scale galaxy clustering on the variance of the Hellings-Downs correlation: numerical results
• Radio Scrutiny of the X-ray-Weak Tail of Low-Mass Active Galactic Nuclei: A Novel Signature of High-Eddington Accretion?
• Assessing the dark matter content of two quasar host galaxies at z~6 through gas kinematics
• Growth of A Massive Black Hole Via Tidal Disruption Accretion
• Self-consistent Solutions of Evolving Nuclear Star Clusters with Two-Dimensional Monte-Carlo Dynamical Simulations
• A compact symmetric ejection from the low mass AGN in the LINER galaxy NGC 4293
• Neutrinos from muon-rich ultra high energy electromagnetic cascades: The MUNHECA code
• Formation and Growth of the First Supermassive Black Holes in MOG
• High-redshift AGN population in radiation-hydrodynamics simulations
• Gravitational collapse at low to moderate Mach numbers: The relationship between star formation efficiency and the fraction of mass in the massive object
• Direct Collapse Accretion Disks Within Dark Matter Halos: Saturation of the Magnetorotational Instability and the Field Expulsion
• Clustering and Runaway Merging in a Primordial Black Hole Dominated Universe
• Resolving Individual Signals in the Presence of Stochastic Background in Future Pulsar Timing Arrays
• Triggered Population III star formation: the effect of H${}_2$ self-shielding
• Bright siren without electromagnetic counterpart by LISA-Taiji-TianQin network
• Detecting Intermediate-Mass Black Holes out to 20 Mpc with ELT/HARMONI: The Case of FCC 119
• Nucleosynthetic signatures of primordial origin around supermassive black holes
• Shedding the envelope: JWST reveals a kiloparsec-scale [OIII]-weak Balmer shell around a z=7.64 quasar
• Exploring the evolution of a dwarf spheroidal galaxy with SPH simulations: II. AGN feedback
• Accelerating lensed quasar discovery and modeling with physics-informed variational autoencoders
• Central Engine and Spectral Energy Distribution Properties of High Redshift Gamma Ray Blazars
• Probing the rapid formation of black holes and their galaxy hosts in QSOs
• H1821+643: The most X-ray and infrared luminous AGN in the Swift/BAT survey in the process of rapid stellar and supermassive black hole mass assembly
• Supercritical dusty BH growth in the early Universe
• Mocking Faint Black Holes during Reionization
• ALMA High-J CO Spectroscopy of High-Redshift Galaxies. II. 0.03" Resolution CO Kinematics Reveal Super-Eddington Accretion in a Dust-Obscured Galaxy at z=3.111
• The Cliff: A Metal-Poor Little Red Dot Hosting an Overmassive Black Hole at $z=3.55$
• Subaru High-z Exploration of Low-Luminosity Quasars (SHELLQs). XIV. A Candidate Type-II Quasar at z=6.1292
• Radiation magnetohydrodynamics simulations of Population III star formation during the Epoch of Reionization
• A first look at quasar-galaxy clustering at $z\simeq 7.3$
• The X-ray weakness of Little Red Dots and JWST-selected AGN: comparison with local AGN in different accretion regimes
• Direct Collapse Black Hole Candidates from Decaying Dark Matter
• Probing supermassive stars and massive black hole seeds through gravitational wave inspirals
• Direct Collapse to Precursors of Supermassive Black Hole Seeds:Radiation-feedback-generated Outflows
• Variability as a new discovery channel for Intermediate-Mass Black Holes in the Time Domain Era
• Super-Eddington Growth Ceiling: Analytic Constraints on the Rapid Growth of Light-Seed Black Holes in Massive Clumps
• Population III Star Formation in an X-ray background: I. Critical Halo Mass of Formation and Total Mass in Stars
• Black Hole Cold Brew: Fermi Degeneracy Pressure
• Neutrino masses, matter-antimatter asymmetry, dark matter, and supermassive black hole formation explained with Majorons
• FROST-CLUSTERS -- III. Metallicity-dependent intermediate mass black hole formation by runaway collisions in dense star clusters
• First Light And Reionization Epoch Simulations (FLARES) -- XIX: Supermassive black hole mergers in the early Universe and their environmental dependence
• NOCTURNE. I. The radio spectrum of narrow-line Seyfert 1 galaxies
• Tidal disruption event rates across cosmic time: forecasts for LSST, Roman, and JWST and their constraints on the supermassive black hole mass function
• New black hole mass calibrations and the fundamental plane of the broad-line region size, luminosity, and velocity
• The In Situ Growth of Stellar-mass "Light" Seed Black Holes in Nuclear Star Clusters
• Euclid: Discovery of 31 new quasars at $6.6<z<7.8$
• A Search for Wandering Black Holes in the Milky Way with Gaia and DECaLS
• A population of luminous globular clusters and stripped nuclei with elevated mass to light ratios around NGC 5128
• QUEST (Quasar Unsupervised Encoder and Synthesis Tool): A machine learning framework to generate quasar spectra
• Black-hole mass estimation through accretion disk spectral fitting for high-redshift blazars
• Cosmological evolution of gas and supermassive black holes in idealized isolated halos
• Dynamics and merger rate of primordial black holes in a cluster
• Supermassive Dark Stars and their remnants as a possible solution to three recent cosmic dawn puzzles
• Revealing the formation histories of the first stars with the cosmic near-infrared background
• Prospects for Revealing Intermediate-Mass Black Holes in NGC 1399 using SKA
• Supermassive black hole formation in the initial collapse of axion dark matter
• M31 nucleus: molecular and ionised gas content upper limits
• Signatures of Exploding Supermassive PopIII Stars at High Redshift in JWST, EUCLID and Roman Space Telescope
• Back to basics: Little Red Dots as galaxies and dust-obscured AGNs in a synthetic NIRCam sky simulated with L-GalaxiesBH
• Lensing in the Darkness: A Bayesian Analysis of 22 Chandra Sources at $z\gtrsim 6$ Shows No Evidence of Lensing
• The brightest X-ray AGNs at redshift $3\lesssim z\lesssim 6$
• Black hole merger rates for LISA and LGWA from semi-analytical modelling of light seeds
• The X-ray statistical properties of dust-obscured galaxies detected by eROSITA
• Off-center black hole seed formation? Implications for high and low redshift massive black holes
• Effect of stochastic kicks on primordial black hole abundance and mass via the compaction function
• Massive black hole formation in dense stellar environments: Enhanced X-ray detection rates in high velocity dispersion nuclear star clusters
• Identification of Candidate Halos Hosting Massive Black Hole Seeds in the $\text{Renaissance}$ Simulations with Support Vector Machines
• Rapid sinking and efficient mergers of supermassive black holes in compact high-redshift galaxies
• The Impact of Powerful Jets on the Far-infrared Emission of an Extreme Radio Quasar at z~6
• Black Hole-Galaxy Correlations in Cluster Zoomed-in Simulations: GIZMO-SIMBA and TNG-Cluster
• Massive black holes and their galaxies
• Gravitational-Wave Signatures of Massive Black Hole Formation
• Modeling Cosmological Evolution of Jetted Seyfert Galaxies for z<10
• Black Holes and Baryon Number Violation: Unveiling the Origins of Early Galaxies and the Low-Mass Gap
• Self-gravitating isothermal sphere in an expanding background
• Source Confusion of Massive Black Hole Binaries for the Taiji Mission
• A novel sub-grid model for super-Eddington accretion of spinning black holes in galaxy-scale simulations
• Radiative feedback on supermassive star formation: the massive end of the Population III initial mass function
• An Estimate of the Impact of Reionization on Supermassive Black Hole Growth
• The Contribution of AGN Accretion Disks to Hydrogen Reionization
• Evaluating statistical significance for massive black hole binary mergers with space-based gravitational wave detectors
• Estimating the spins of supermassive black holes in distant ultraluminous quasars
• Accretion of self-interacting dark matter onto supermassive black holes
• Quasar clustering at redshift 6
• Insights for Early Massive Black Hole Growth from JWST Detection of the [Ne v] λ3427 Emission Line
• Direct Collapse Pre-supermassive Black Hole Objects as Ly$\alpha$ Emitters