Sowing Black Hole Seeds: Forming Direct Collapse Black Holes With Realistic Lyman-Werner Radiation Fields in Cosmological Simulations
Abstract
Luminous quasars detected at redshifts z > 6 require that the first black holes form early and grow to ~109 solar masses within one Gyr. Our work uses cosmological simulations to study the formation and early growth of direct collapse black holes. In the pre-reionization epoch, molecular hydrogen (H2) causes gas to fragment and form Population III stars, but Lyman-Werner radiation can suppress H2 formation and allow gas to collapse directly into a massive black hole. The critical flux required to inhibit H2 formation, Jcrit, is hotly debated, largely due to the uncertainties in the source radiation spectrum, H2 self-shielding, and collisional dissociation rates. Here, we test the power of the direct collapse model in a non-uniform Lyman-Werner radiation field, using an updated version of the SPH+N-body tree code Gasoline with H2 non-equilibrium abundance tracking, H2 cooling, and a modern SPH implementation. We vary Jcrit from 30 to 104 J21 to study the effect on seed black holes, focusing on black hole formation as a function of environment, halo mass, metallicity, and proximity of the Lyman-Werner source. We discuss the constraints on massive black hole occupation fraction in the quasar epoch, and implications for reionization, high-redshift X-ray background radiation, and gravitational waves.
- Publication:
-
American Astronomical Society Meeting Abstracts #227
- Pub Date:
- January 2016
- Bibcode:
- 2016AAS...22724117H