Light, medium-weight or heavy? The nature of the first supermassive black hole seeds

Abstract

Observations of hyper-luminous quasars at $z>6$ reveal the rapid growth of supermassive black holes (SMBHs $>10^9{\mathrm{M}}_{\odot }$) whose origin is still difficult to explain. Their progenitors may have formed as remnants of massive, metal free stars (light seeds), via stellar collisions (medium-weight seeds) and/or massive gas clouds direct collapse (heavy seeds). In this work we investigate for the first time the relative role of these three seed populations in the formation of $z>6$ SMBHs within an Eddington-limited gas accretion scenario. To this aim, we implement in our semi-analytical data-constrained model a statistical description of the spatial fluctuations of Lyman-Werner (LW) photo-dissociating radiation and of metal/dust enrichment. This allows us to set the physical conditions for BH seeds formation, exploring their relative birth rate in a highly biased region of the Universe at $z>6$. We find that the inclusion of medium-weight seeds does not qualitatively change the growth history of the first SMBHs: although less massive seeds ($<10^3{\mathrm{M}}_{\odot }$) form at a higher rate, the mass growth of a $\sim 10^9{\mathrm{M}}_{\odot }$ SMBH at $z<15$ is driven by efficient gas accretion (at a sub-Eddington rate) onto its heavy progenitors ($10^5{\mathrm{M}}_{\odot }$). This conclusion holds independently of the critical level of LW radiation and even when medium-weight seeds are allowed to form in higher metallicity galaxies, via the so-called super-competitive accretion scenario. Our study suggests that the genealogy of $z\sim 6$ SMBHs is characterized by a rich variety of BH progenitors, which represent only a small fraction ($<10-20\%$) of all the BHs that seed galaxies at $z>15$.

(21 pages, 18 figures, 2 tables. Accepted for publication in MNRAS)

References in corpus (47)

• The EAGLE project: Simulating the evolution and assembly of galaxies and their environments
• Introducing the Illustris Project: Simulating the coevolution of dark and visible matter in the Universe
• An ultra-luminous quasar with a twelve-billion-solar-mass black hole at redshift 6.30
• A Luminous Quasar at Redshift 7.642
• The Pan-STARRS1 distant z>5.6 quasar survey: more than 100 quasars within the first Gyr of the universe
• Protostar Formation in the Early Universe
• Pōniuā'ena: A Luminous $z=7.5$ Quasar Hosting a 1.5 Billion Solar Mass Black Hole
• The Final SDSS High-Redshift Quasar Sample of 52 Quasars at z>5.7
• Evolution of interstellar dust and stardust in the solar neighbourhood
• Formation of the first nuclear clusters and massive black holes at high redshift
• Fluctuations in the High-Redshift Lyman-Werner Background: Close Halo Pairs as the Origin of Supermassive Black Holes
• Super-Critical Growth of Massive Black Holes from Stellar-Mass Seeds
• Can Supermassive Black Holes Form in Metal-Enriched High-Redshift Protogalaxies ?
• Population III stars: hidden or disappeared ?
• Formation of massive black holes in rapidly growing pre-galactic gas clouds
• Resolving the Formation of Protogalaxies. II. Central Gravitational Collapse
• Growth and activity of black holes in galaxy mergers with varying mass ratios
• Initial mass function of intermediate mass black hole seeds
• Feedback-regulated Super Massive Black Hole Seed Formation
• 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
• Slim disks around Kerr black holes revisited
• The critical radiation intensity for direct collapse black hole formation: dependence on the radiation spectral shape
• Constraining the high redshift formation of black hole seeds in nuclear star clusters with gas inflows
• Formation of massive protostars in atomic cooling haloes
• Growing Massive Black Hole Pairs in Minor Mergers of Disk Galaxies
• Formation of an embryonic supermassive star in the first galaxy
• Limits on Pop III star formation with the most iron-poor stars
• Nonlinear clustering during the cosmic Dark Ages and its effect on the 21-cm background from minihalos
• The mass function of high redshift seed black holes
• Decoding the stellar fossils of the dusty Milky Way progenitors
• The formation of direct collapse black holes under the influence of streaming velocities
• High-redshift quasars host galaxies: is there a stellar mass crisis?
• The Direct Collapse of a Massive Black Hole Seed Under the Influence of an Anisotropic Lyman-Werner Source
• A 10,000-solar-mass black hole in the nucleus of a bulgeless dwarf galaxy
• Radiation hydrodynamics simulations of the formation of direct-collapse supermassive stellar systems
• Populating the low-mass end of the $M_{\mathrm{BH}}-{\sigma }_{\ast }$ relation
• The suppression of direct collapse black hole formation by soft X-ray irradiation
• A No-Go Theorem for Direct Collapse Black Holes Without a Strong Ultraviolet Background
• Forming massive seed black holes in high-redshift quasar host progenitors
• Beyond Jcrit: a critical curve for suppression of H2-cooling in protogalaxies
• Supernova dust formation and the grain growth in the early universe: The critical metallicity for low-mass star formation
• The sustainable growth of the first black holes
• The origin of the most iron-poor star
• Indication of Another Intermediate-mass Black Hole in the Galactic Center
• Unveiling early black hole growth with multi-frequency gravitational wave observations
• Following the Cosmic Evolution of Pristine Gas III: The Observational Consequences of the Unknown Properties of Population III Stars
• Gravitational stability and fragmentation condition for discs around accreting supermassive stars

Cited by in corpus (41)

• JADES. The diverse population of infant Black Holes at 4<z<11: merging, tiny, poor, but mighty
• The X-shooter/ALMA Sample of Quasars in the Epoch of Reionization. II. Black Hole Masses, Eddington Ratios, and the Formation of the First Quasars
• The low-end of the black hole mass function at cosmic dawn
• The Science of the Einstein Telescope
• A SPectroscopic survey of biased halos In the Reionization Era (ASPIRE): JWST Reveals a Filamentary Structure around a z=6.61 Quasar
• Impact of the cosmic background radiation on the initial mass function of metal-poor stars
• Public Release of A-SLOTH: Ancient Stars and Local Observables by Tracing Halos
• Gravitational Wave Astronomy With TianQin
• Rapid growth of seed black holes during early bulge formation
• Multi-flavour SMBH seeding and evolution in cosmological environments
• Formation of supermassive stars in the first star clusters
• Seeking the growth of the first black hole seeds with JWST
• Origin of supermassive black holes in massive metal-poor protoclusters
• The Age of Discovery with the James Webb: Excavating the Spectral Signatures of the First Massive Black Holes
• Supercritical growth pathway to overmassive black holes at cosmic dawn: coevolution with massive quasar hosts
• Probing the $z\gtrsim 6$ quasars in a universe with IllustrisTNG physics: Impact of gas-based black hole seeding models
• Super-critical accretion of medium-weight seed black holes in gaseous proto-galactic nuclei
• Observability of Low-Luminosity AGN in the Early Universe with JWST
• Global instability by runaway collisions in nuclear stellar clusters: Numerical tests of a route for massive black hole formation
• Imprints of Supermassive Black Hole Evolution on the Spectral and Spatial Anisotropy of Nano-Hertz Stochastic Gravitational-Wave Background
• Direct collapse of exceptionally heavy black holes in the merger-driven scenario
• Modelling the cosmological Lyman-Werner background radiation field in the Early Universe
• The Assembly of Black Hole Mass and Luminosity Functions of High-redshift Quasars via Multiple Accretion Episodes
• Formation of supermassive black holes in galactic nuclei II: retention and growth of seed intermediate-mass black holes
• The role of Pop III stars and early black holes in the 21cm signal from Cosmic Dawn
• Astraeus VI: Hierarchical assembly of AGN and their large-scale effect during the Epoch of Reionization
• Direct-collapse black hole formation induced by internal radiation of host halos
• Cosmological 21cm line observations to test scenarios of super-Eddington accretion on to black holes being seeds of high-redshifted supermassive black holes
• Efficiency of black hole formation via collisions in stellar systems: An analysis of data from simulations and observations
• Massive black hole formation in Population III star clusters
• The physical origin of super-competitive accretion during the formation of the first supermassive black holes
• A Global Semi-Analytic Model of the First Stars and Galaxies Including Dark Matter Halo Merger Histories
• Formation of supermassive stars in the first stellar clusters: Dependence on the gas temperature
• Identification of Intermediate-mass Black Hole Candidates Among a Sample of Sd Galaxies
• Super-Eddington accretion in high-redshift quasar hosts: Black-hole driven outflows, galaxy quenching, and the nature of little red dots
• The imprint of gas on gravitational waves from LISA intermediate-mass black hole binaries
• The Resurgence of the G(2) Group for the Strong Sector and the Emergence of Dark Matter
• Identification of Candidate Halos Hosting Massive Black Hole Seeds in the $\text{Renaissance}$ Simulations with Support Vector Machines
• Off-center black hole seed formation? Implications for high and low redshift massive black holes
• A novel sub-grid model for super-Eddington accretion of spinning black holes in galaxy-scale simulations
• Massive star clusters detected by JWST as natural birth places to form intermediate-mass black holes