Related papers: Cold flows and the first quasars
High-redshift luminous quasars powered by accreting supermassive black holes (SMBHs) with mass $\gtrsim 10^9 M_\odot$ constrain their formation pathways. We investigate the formation of heavy seeds of SMBHs through gas collapse in the…
The tight relationship between the masses of black holes and galaxy spheroids in nearby galaxies implies a causal connection between the growth of these two components. Optically luminous quasars host the most prodigious accreting black…
We investigate the coupled formation and evolution of galaxies and their embedded supermassive black holes using state-of-the-art hydrodynamic simulations of cosmological structure formation. For the first time, we self-consistently follow…
We present a model for the formation of massive black holes ($\sim 1000 \msun$) due to stellar-dynamical processes in the first stellar clusters formed at early cosmic times ($z\sim10-20$). The high redshift black hole seeds form as a…
We have obtained deep, multi-band imaging observations around three of the most distant known quasars at redshifts z>6. Standard accretion theory predicts that the supermassive black holes present in these quasars were formed at a very…
The first massive astrophysical black holes likely formed at high redshifts (z>10) at the centers of low mass (~10^6 Msun) dark matter concentrations. These black holes grow by mergers and gas accretion, evolve into the population of bright…
The properties of quasar-host galaxies might be determined by the growth and feedback of their supermassive (SMBH, $10^{8-10}$ M$_{\odot}$) black holes. We investigate such connection with a suite of cosmological simulations of massive…
The most massive black holes, lurking at the centers of large galaxies, must have formed less than a billion years after the big bang, as they are visible today in the form of bright quasars at redshift larger than six. Their early…
We assess models for the assembly of supermassive black holes (SMBHs) at the center of galaxies that trace their hierarchical build-up far up in the dark halo `merger tree'. We assume that the first `seed' black holes (BHs) formed in…
The rapid assembly of the massive black holes that power the luminous quasars observed at $z \sim 6-7$ remains a puzzle. Various direct collapse models have been proposed to head-start black hole growth from initial seeds with masses $\sim…
There is growing observational evidence for a population of supermassive black holes (SMBHs) in galactic bulges. We examine in detail the conditions under which these black holes must have originated from primordial black holes (PBHs). We…
Observations of high-redshift quasars at z>6 imply that supermassive black holes (SMBHs) with masses over a billion solar masses were in place less than 1 Gyr after the Big Bang. If these SMBHs assembled from "seed" BHs left behind by the…
The Sloan Digital Sky survey detected luminous quasars at very high redshift, z>6. Follow-up observations indicated that at least some of these quasars are powered by supermassive black holes (SMBHs) with masses in excess of billion solar…
We consider the physical conditions under which supermassive black holes could have formed inside the first galaxies. Our SPH simulations indicate that metal-free galaxies with a virial temperature ~10^4 K and with suppressed H2 formation…
Cold quasars are a rare population of luminous, unobscured quasars associated with host galaxies that have a high star formation rate. We aimed to study the host galaxies of sixty four of these cold quasars in order to probe how the…
Supermassive black holes (SMBHs) of $\sim 10^9\, M_\odot$ are generally believed to be the central engines of the luminous quasars observed at $z\gtrsim6$, but their astrophysical origin remains elusive. The $z\gtrsim$ quasars reside in…
The recent discovery of luminous quasars up to a redshift z=6.43 has renewed interest in the formation of black holes massive enough to power quasars. If black holes grow by Eddington-limited gas accretion with a radiative efficiency of at…
It has been recently suggested that supermassive black holes at z = 5-6 might form from super-fast (\dot M > 10^4 Msun/yr) accretion occurring in unstable, massive nuclear gas disks produced by mergers of Milky-Way size galaxies.…
Supernova theory suggests that black holes of a stellar origin cannot attain masses in the range of 50-135 solar masses in isolation. We argue here that this mass gap is filled in by black holes that grow by gas accretion in dense stellar…
The astrophysical processes that led to the formation of the first seed black holes and to their growth into the supermassive variety that powers bright quasars at redshift 6 are poorly understood. In standard LCDM hierarchical cosmologies,…