18 papers
Massive Perturbers and Transient Pickup Discs in Disc-Crossing Encounters in OJ 287-like Supermassive Black Hole Binaries
Debojyoti Garain, Jonathan Zrake, Zoltan Haiman
We study the hydrodynamical response of a massive black hole accretion disc punctured by a lower mass black hole on an inclined, eccentric orbit, as motivated by the quasi-periodic…
ASPIRE: The Environments and Dark Matter Halos of Luminous Quasars in the Epoch of Reionization
Feige Wang, Jaclyn B. Champagne, Jiamu Huang +42
We present a systematic study of the environments of 25 luminous quasars at from the ASPIRE program. Using JWST/NIRCam WFSS data, we identified 487 galaxies at $5.3 \less…
The Emergence of Little Red Dots from Binary Massive Black Holes
Kohei Inayoshi, Jinyi Shangguan, Xian Chen +2
Little red dots (LRDs) are a newly identified class of broad-line active galactic nuclei (AGN) with a distinctive v-shape spectrum characterized by red optical and blue UV continuu…
Chemical Signatures of Population III Stars in Damped Lyman- Absorption Systems at
Eli Visbal, Greg L. Bryan, Zoltan Haiman
Recently, Sodini et al. (2024) presented a sample of OI damped Lyman- absorption system (DLA) analogs at that contain possible chemical signatures of Population III (P…
Hunting the first Cosmic Giants: formation and detectability of Direct Collapse Black Holes around high-redshift quasars
Alessandro Trinca, Alessandro Lupi, Zoltán Haiman +5
The rapid emergence of supermassive black holes (SMBHs) in the early Universe poses a challenge to current models of black hole growth. One promising formation pathway is the direc…
Lomb-Scargle periodograms struggle with non-sinusoidal supermassive BH binary signatures in quasar lightcurves
Allison Lin, Maria Charisi, Zoltan Haiman
Supermassive black hole binary (SMBHB) systems are expected to form as a consequence of galaxy mergers. At sub-parsec separations, SMBHBs can be identified as quasars with periodic…