Ubiquitous seeding of supermassive black holes by direct collapse

Understand

We study for the first time the environment of massive black hole (BH) seeds (~10^4-5 Msun) formed via the direct collapse of pristine gas clouds in massive haloes (>10^7 Msun) at z>6.

• Our model is based on the evolution of dark matter haloes within a cosmological N-body simulation, combined with prescriptions for the formation of BH along with both Pop III and Pop II stars.
• We calculate the spatially-varying intensity of Lyman Werner (LW) radiation from stars and identify the massive pristine haloes in which it is high enough to shut down molecular hydrogen cooling.
• In contrast to previous BH seeding models with a spatially constant LW background, we find that the intensity of LW radiation due to local sources, J_local, can be up to 10^6 times the spatially averaged background in the simulated volume and exceeds the critical value, J_crit, for the complete suppression of molecular cooling, in some cases by 4 orders of magnitude.