Related papers: Early reionization by miniquasars
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,…
We consider the formation of binary intermediate black holes (BIMBH) in globular clusters (GC), which could happen either in situ or due to the mergers between clusters. We simulate the evolution of the BIMBH orbit (and its subsequent…
Close encounters between two initially unbound objects can result in a binary system if enough energy is released as gravitational waves (GWs). We address the scenario in which such encounters occur in merging elliptical galaxies. There is…
Ultralight primordial black holes (PBHs) provide a compelling window into early-Universe cosmology. Following our earlier work, we explore a mechanism for the formation of ultralight PBHs sourced by primordial inflationary magnetic fields,…
Repeated mergers of stellar-mass black holes (BHs) in dense star clusters can produce intermediate-mass black holes (IMBHs). In particular, nuclear star clusters at the centers of galaxies have deep enough potential wells to retain most of…
We study the formation of intermediate-mass ratio inspirals (IMRIs) triggered by the interactions between two stellar black holes (BHs) and an intermediate-mass BH (IMBH) inhabiting the centre of a dense star cluster. We exploit $N$-body…
The contribution of stars in galaxies to cosmic reionisation depends on the star formation history in the Universe, the abundance of galaxies during reionisation, the escape fraction of ionising photons and the clumping factor of the…
Characterising the prevalence and properties of faint active galactic nuclei (AGN) in the early Universe is key for understanding the formation of supermassive black holes (SMBHs) and determining their role in cosmic reionization. We…
Astrophysical scenarios for the formation and evolution of intermediate-mass black holes (IMBHs) in the mass range $10^2 M_\odot \lesssim M \lesssim 10^6 M_\odot$ remain uncertain, but future ground-based gravitational-wave (GW)…
Intermediate mass black holes (IMBHs), with masses between 100 to 10^5 M_\odot, represent the link between stellar mass black holes and the supermassive black holes that reside in galaxy centers. While IMBHs are crucial to our understanding…
Large-scale polarization of the cosmic microwave background measured by the WMAP satellite requires a mean optical depth to Thomson scattering, tau_e ~ 0.17. The reionization of the universe must therefore have begun at relatively high…
Primordial black holes (PBHs) with log-normal mass spectrum with masses up to $\sim 10^4-10^5 M_\odot$ can be created after QCD phase transition in the early Universe at $z\sim 10^{12}$ by the modified Affleck-Dine baryogenesis. Using a…
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…
Intermediate-mass black holes (IMBHs, 10^2-10^5 M_sun) fill the gap between stellar-mass black holes and supermassive black holes (SMBHs). Simulations have shown that IMBHs may form in dense star clusters, and therefore may still be present…
Detecting the seed black holes from which quasars formed is extremely challenging; however, those seeds that did not grow into supermassive should be found as intermediate-mass black holes (IMBHs) of 100-10$^5$ M$_{\odot}$ in local dwarf…
In all inflationary scenarios of primordial black holes (PBH) formation, amplified scalar perturbations inevitably accompany an induced stochastic gravitational waves background (ISGWB) at smaller scales. In this paper, we study the ISGWB…
Observations of high-redshift quasars hosting billion solar mass black holes at $z\gtrsim6$ challenge our understanding of early supermassive black hole (SMBH) growth. In this work, we conduct a near-infrared spectroscopic study of $19$…
Even though the existence of intermediate-mass black holes (IMBHs, black holes with masses ranging between $10^{2-4}\,M_{\odot}$) has not yet been corroborated observationally, these objects are of high interest for astrophysics. Our…
We revisit the possibility of constraining the properties of dark matter (DM) by studying the epoch of cosmic reionization. Previous studies have shown that DM annihilation was unlikely to have provided a large fraction of the photons that…
We investigate the possibility that present-day galaxies and their dark matter haloes contain a population of massive black holes (MBHs) that form by hierarchical merging of the black hole remnants of the first stars in the Universe. Some…