The origin of most massive black holes at high-z: BLUETIDES and the next quasar frontier

Understand

The growth of the most massive black holes in the early universe, consistent with the detection of highly luminous quasars at $z> 6$ implies sustained, critical accretion of material to grow and power them.

• Given a black hole seed scenario, it is still uncertain which conditions in the early Universe allow the fastest black hole growth.
• Large scale hydrodynamical cosmological simulations of structure formation allow us to explore the conditions conducive to the growth of the earliest supermassive black holes.
• We use the cosmological hydrodynamic simulation BlueTides, which incorporates a variety of baryon physics in a (400 Mpc/h)^3 volume with 0.7 trillion particles to follow the earliest phases of black hole critical growth.