Direct Formation of Supermassive Black Holes via Multi-Scale Gas Inflows in Galaxy Mergers

Understand

Observations of distant bright quasars suggest that billion solar mass supermassive black holes (SMBHs) were already in place less than a billion years after the Big Bang.

• Models in which light black hole seeds form by the collapse of primordial metal-free stars cannot explain their rapid appearance due to inefficient gas accretion.
• Alternatively, these black holes may form by direct collapse of gas at the center of protogalaxies.
• However, this requires metal-free gas that does not cool efficiently and thus is not turned into stars, in contrast with the rapid metal enrichment of protogalaxies.