English

Radiative effects during the assembly of direct collapse black holes

Astrophysics of Galaxies 2017-09-13 v2 Cosmology and Nongalactic Astrophysics

Abstract

We perform a post-processing radiative feedback analysis on a 3D ab initio cosmological simulation of an atomic cooling halo under the direct collapse black hole (DCBH) scenario. We maintain the spatial resolution of the simulation by incorporating native ray-tracing on unstructured mesh data, including Monte Carlo Lyman-alpha (Ly{\alpha}) radiative transfer. DCBHs are born in gas-rich, metal-poor environments with the possibility of Compton-thick conditions, NH1024cm2N_H \gtrsim 10^{24} {\rm cm}^{-2}. Therefore, the surrounding gas is capable of experiencing the full impact of the bottled-up radiation pressure. In particular, we find that multiple scattering of Ly{\alpha} photons provides an important source of mechanical feedback after the gas in the sub-parsec region becomes partially ionized, avoiding the bottleneck of destruction via the two-photon emission mechanism. We provide detailed discussion of the simulation environment, expansion of the ionization front, emission and escape of Ly{\alpha} radiation, and Compton scattering. A sink particle prescription allows us to extract approximate limits on the post-formation evolution of the radiative feedback. Fully coupled Ly{\alpha} radiation hydrodynamics will be crucial to consider in future DCBH simulations.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.1706.02751,
  title  = {Radiative effects during the assembly of direct collapse black holes},
  author = {Aaron Smith and Fernando Becerra and Volker Bromm and Lars Hernquist},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1706.02751},
  year   = {2017}
}

Comments

12 pages, 11 figures, MNRAS, in press