paper

The Formation of the First Quasars. I. The Black Hole Seeds, Accretion and Feedback Models

arXiv:2012.01458

Abstract

Supermassive black holes (SMBHs) of are generally believed to be the central engines of the luminous quasars observed at , but their astrophysical origin remains elusive. The quasars reside in rare density peaks, which poses several challenges to uniform hydrodynamic simulations. To investigate the formation of these distant quasars, we perform a suite of zoom-in simulations on a favorable halo, with a mass of at and a history of multiple major mergers, ideal for BH growth. We test BH seeds of , and various accretion and feedback models, including thin-disk and slim-disk accretion. We find, contrary to previous studies, that light seeds of fail to grow to by even with super-critical accretion; that the hyper-Eddington mode leads to lower accretion rates than the Eddington-limited case due to stronger feedback, resulting in significantly smaller BHs by two orders of magnitude; and that while the super-critical model boosts the growth of low-spin BHs, for high-spin BHs the mass may be reduced due to increased radiative feedback. Our simulations show that the first SMBHs may grow from heavy seeds of via Eddington-limited or mild super-critical accretion facilitated by gas-rich mergers and self-regulated by feedback, and they co-evolve with their host galaxies, producing bright quasars such as those at 6 and ULAS J1342+0928, currently the most distant quasar at z = 7.54.

21 pages, 15 figures, comments welcome

Cited by in corpus (4)

The Formation of the First Quasars. I. The Black Hole Seeds, Accretion and Feedback Models · wovepaper