Related papers: A practical guide to the massive black hole cosmic…
We investigate a hierarchical structure formation scenario describing the evolution of a Super Massive Black Holes (SMBHs) population. The seeds of the local SMBHs are assumed to be 'pregalactic' black holes, remnants of the first POPIII…
Supermassive black holes (BH) at the centres of galaxies can rapidly change their mass and spin by gas accretion and mergers. Using hydrodynamical cosmological simulations, with prescriptions for BH growth and feedback from Active Galactic…
With detections of quasars powered by increasingly massive black holes (BHs) at increasingly early times in cosmic history over the past decade, there has been correspondingly rapid progress made on the theory of early BH formation and…
The growth of supermassive black holes (SMBHs) remains a central problem in astrophysics, with current observations providing only limited constraints on the underlying mechanisms. One possible growth channel is stellar accretion via the…
I overview the current understanding of the evolution of massive black hole (MBH) binaries in the center of the host stellar system. One of the main questions is whether the stellar dynamical effect can make the MBH binary hard enough that…
Supermassive black hole (SMBH) growth plausibly occurs via runaway astrophysical black hole mergers in nuclear star clusters that form intermediate mass black hole seeds at high redshifts. Such a model yields an order-of-magnitude higher…
The advent of new and near-future observatories probing the earliest epochs of the Universe has opened the opportunity to investigate the formation and growth of the first massive black holes (MBHs). Additionally, the use of high resolution…
I review scenarios for the assembly of supermassive black holes (MBHs) at the center of galaxies that trace their hierarchical build-up far up in the dark matter halo "merger tree". Monte Carlo realizations of the merger hierarchy in a LCDM…
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,…
The emergence of supermassive black holes (SMBHs) in the early universe remains a topic of profound interest and debate. In this paper, we investigate the formation and growth of the first SMBHs within the framework of Modified Gravity…
One of the main themes in extragalactic astronomy for the next decade will be the evolution of galaxies over cosmic time. Many future observatories, including JWST, ALMA, GMT, TMT and E-ELT will intensively observe starlight over a broad…
The formation and evolution of binary black holes (BH) is studied using the modern evolutionary scenario for very massive stars with high mass loss (Vanbeveren et al. 1998). Main sequence stars with masses $M>35 M_\odot$ are assumed to form…
[Abridged] [...] We study the mass and spin evolution of massive black holes within a semianalytical galaxy-formation model that follows the evolution of dark-matter halos along merger trees, as well as that of the baryonic components (hot…
We study the expected distribution of massive black hole (MBH) spins and its evolution with cosmic time in the context of hierarchical galaxy formation theories. Our model uses Monte Carlo realizations of the merger hierarchy in a LCDM…
Based on the previously formulated theory of spherical perturbations in the cosmological medium of self-gravitating scalarly charged fermions with the Higgs scalar interaction and the similarity properties of such models, the formation of…
This is the second paper in a series aimed at modeling the black hole (BH) mass function, from the stellar to the (super)massive regime. In the present work we focus on (super)massive BHs and provide an ab-initio computation of their mass…
We investigate the formation and growth of massive black hole (BH) seeds in dusty star-forming galaxies, relying and extending the framework proposed by Boco et al. 2020. Specifically, the latter envisages the migration of stellar compact…
Supermassive black holes are nowadays believed to reside in most local galaxies. Accretion of gas and black hole mergers play a fundamental role in determining the two parameters defining a black hole: mass and spin. I briefly review here…
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 dynamics of massive black holes (BHs) in galaxy mergers is a rich field of research that has seen much progress in recent years. In this contribution we briefly review the processes describing the journey of BHs during mergers, from the…