Accretion onto the First Stellar-Mass Black Holes

The first stars, forming at redshifts z > 15 in minihalos with M ~ 10^5-6 M _sun may leave behind remnant black holes, which could conceivably have been the "seeds" for the supermassive black holes observed at z lsim 7. We study remnant black hole growth through accretion, including for the first time the radiation emitted due to accretion, with adaptive mesh refinement cosmological radiation-hydrodynamical simulations. The effects of photoionization and heating dramatically affect the large-scale inflow, resulting in negligible mass growth. We compare cases with accretion luminosity included and neglected to show that accretion radiation drastically changes the environment within 100 pc of the black hole, increasing gas temperatures by an order of magnitude. Gas densities are reduced and further star formation in the same minihalo is prevented for the 200 million years we followed. Without radiative feedback included most seed black holes do not gain mass as efficiently as has been hoped for in previous theories, implying that black hole remnants of population III stars in minihalos are not likely to be miniquasars. Most importantly, however, our calculations demonstrate that if these black holes are indeed accreting close to the Bondi-Hoyle rate with 10% radiative efficiency they have a dramatic local effect in regulating star formation in the first galaxies. This suggests a novel mechanism for massive black hole formation—stellar-mass black holes may have suppressed fragmentation and star formation after falling into halos with virial temperatures ~10⁴ K, facilitating massive black hole formation at their centers.