We propose that one of the sources in the recently detected system CR7 by Sobral et al. (2015) through spectro-photometric measurements at z=6.6 harbors a direct collapse blackhole (DCBH). We argue that the LW radiation field required for direct collapse in source A is provided by sources B and C. By tracing the LW production history and star formation rate over cosmic time for the halo hosting CR7 in a ΛCDM universe, we demonstrate that a DCBH could have formed at z∼20. The spectrum of source A is well fit by nebular emission from primordial gas around a BH with MBH ∼4.4×106M⊙ accreting at a 40 % of the Eddington rate, which strongly supports our interpretation of the data. Combining these lines of evidence, we argue that CR7 might well be the first DCBH candidate.
@article{arxiv.1510.01733,
title = {Detecting Direct Collapse Black Holes: making the case for CR7},
author = {Bhaskar Agarwal and Jarrett L. Johnson and Erik Zackrisson and Ivo Labbe and Frank C. van den Bosch and Priyamvada Natarajan and Sadegh Khochfar},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1510.01733},
year = {2016}
}
Comments
8 pages, 4 figures. Accepted for publication in MNRAS