Related papers: The Birth of Binary Direct-Collapse Black Holes
Supermassive black hole binaries (SMBHs) are expected to result from galaxy mergers, and thus are natural byproducts (and probes) of hierarchical structure formation in the Universe. They are also the primary expected source of…
Direct collapse of supermassive stars (SMSs) is a possible pathway for generating supermassive black holes in the early universe. It is expected that an SMS could form via very rapid mass accretion with Mdot ~ 0.1 - 1 Msun/yr during the…
Supermassive black holes (BHs) of millions solar masses and above reside in the center of most local galaxies, but they also power active galactic nuclei and quasars, detected up to z=7. This observational evidence puts strong constraints…
The possible formation of Direct Collapse Black Holes (DCBHs) in the first metal-free atomic cooling halos at high redshifts ($z > 10$) is nowadays object of intense study and several methods to prove their existence are currently under…
Observations of the most distant bright quasars imply that billion solar mass supermassive black holes (SMBH) have to be assembled within the first eight hundred million years. Under our standard galaxy formation scenario such fast growth…
Binary black holes occupy a special place in our quest for understanding the evolution of galaxies along cosmic history. If massive black holes grow at the center of (pre-)galactic structures that experience a sequence of merger episodes,…
Collapsing supermassive stars (SMSs) with masses $M \gtrsim 10^{4-6}M_\odot$ have long been speculated to be the seeds that can grow and become supermassive black holes (SMBHs). We previously performed GRMHD simulations of marginally stable…
The evolution of nonlinear density fluctuations around the Jeans mass shortly after cosmological recombination is analyzed using a 3D hydrodynamics/dark--matter code. The Cosmic Background Radiation (CBR) exerts Compton friction on free…
We describe a mechanism by which supermassive black holes can form directly in the nuclei of protogalaxies, without the need for seed black holes left over from early star formation. Self-gravitating gas in dark matter halos can lose…
Gravitational collapse of a massive primordial gas cloud is thought to be a promising path for the formation of supermassive blackholes in the early universe. We study conditions for the so-called direct collapse (DC) blackhole formation in…
More than two hundred supermassive black holes (SMBHs) of masses $\gtrsim 10^9\,\mathrm{M_{\odot}}$ have been discovered at $z \gtrsim 6$. One promising pathway for the formation of SMBHs is through the collapse of supermassive stars (SMSs)…
The emergence of the first black holes during the first billion years of cosmic history marks a key event in cosmology. Their formation is part of the overall process of ending the cosmic dark ages, when the first stars appeared in low-mass…
The Direct Collapse scenario to form the supermassive black hole (SMBH) seeds offers the most promising way to explain the origin of quasars at $z>7$. Assuming atomic primordial gas, can Ly$\alpha$ photons escape from the central regions of…
The collapse of supermassive primordial stars in hot, atomically-cooled halos may have given birth to the first quasars at $z \sim$ 15 - 20. Recent numerical simulations of these rapidly accreting stars reveal that they are cool, red…
Observed active galactic nuclei at redshifts $\gtrsim 6$ suggest that supermassive black holes (SMBHs) had formed early on. Accretion of matter onto remnants of Population III stars leading to SMBHs is a very slow process, and therefore,…
Explaining the existence of supermassive black holes (SMBHs) larger than $\sim 10^9 M_\odot$ at redshifts $z >\sim 6$ remains an open theoretical question. One possibility is that gas collapsing rapidly in pristine atomic cooling halos…
We employ cosmological hydrodynamical simulations to study the growth of massive black holes (BHs) at high redshifts subject to BH merger recoils from gravitational wave emission. We select the most massive dark matter halo at z=6 from the…
Interest to astrophysical evidence for primordial black holes (PBHs) formed in the early Universe from initial cosmological perturbations has increased after the discovery of coalescing binary black holes with masses more than dozen solar…
Recent observations of short gamma-ray bursts (SGRBs) suggest that binary neutron star (NS) mergers can create highly magnetised, millisecond NSs. Sharp cut-offs in X-ray afterglow plateaus of some SGRBs hint at the gravitational collapse…
We model for the first time the complete orbital evolution of a pair of Supermassive Black Holes (SMBHs) in a 1:10 galaxy merger of two disk dominated gas-rich galaxies, from the stage prior to the formation of the binary up to the onset of…