Formation of supermassive black hole seeds

Understand

The detection of quasars at $z>6$ unveils the presence of supermassive black holes (BHs) of a few billion solar masses.

• The rapid formation process of these extreme objects remains a fascinating and open issue.
• Such discovery implies that seed black holes must have formed early on, and grown via either rapid accretion or BH/galaxy mergers.
• In this theoretical review, we discuss in detail various BH seed formation mechanisms and the physical processes at play during their assembly.