Fossil SMBHs in the Milky Way Halo

As galaxies assemble through hierarchical merging, some black holes grow to become the central black holes of massive galaxies; however, others may be stripped via interactions into regions of galaxies where they will remain quiescent. Such objects may be the source of observed off-nuclear intermediate-mass black hole candidates, as detected by Farrell et al. (2009). We use a cosmological N-body simulation of a disk-dominated galaxy (V_c = 140 km s^-1, presented by Governato et al. 2009) to examine the formation and merging histories of seed black holes during hierarchical assembly. Our method incorporates star formation, supernova feedback, a physically motivated description of black hole seed creation, growth, and merging.