How long do high-redshift massive black hole seeds remain outliers in black hole vs. host galaxy relations?
Abstract
The existence of supermassive black holes (SMBHs) within the first billion years of the universe remains a puzzle in our conventional understanding of black hole formation and growth. Several suggested formation pathways for these SMBHs lead to a heavy seed, with an initial black hole mass of . This can lead to an overly massive BH galaxy (OMBG), whose nuclear black hole's mass is comparable to or even greater than the surrounding stellar mass: the black hole to stellar mass ratio is , well in excess of the typical values at lower redshift. We investigate how long these newborn BHs remain outliers in the relation, by exploring the subsequent evolution of two OMBGs previously identified in the \texttt{Renaissance} simulations. We find that both OMBGs have during their entire life, from their birth at until they merge with much more massive haloes at . We find that the OMBGs are spatially resolvable from their more massive, , neighboring haloes until their mergers are complete at . This affords a window for future observations with {\it JWST} and sensitive X-ray telescopes to diagnose the heavy-seed scenario, by detecting similar OMBGs and establishing their uniquely high black hole-to-stellar mass ratio.
Keywords
Cite
@article{arxiv.2205.09611,
title = {How long do high-redshift massive black hole seeds remain outliers in black hole vs. host galaxy relations?},
author = {Matthew T. Scoggins and Zoltán Haiman and John H. Wise},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2205.09611},
year = {2022}
}
Comments
15 pages, 10 figures. Accepted in MNRAS