On the Maximum Mass of Accreting Primordial Supermassive Stars

Understand

Supermassive primordial stars are suspected to be the progenitors of the most massive quasars at z~6.

• Previous studies of such stars were either unable to resolve hydrodynamical timescales or considered stars in isolation, not in the extreme accretion flows in which they actually form.
• Therefore, they could not self-consistently predict their final masses at collapse, or those of the resulting supermassive black hole seeds, but rather invoked comparison to simple polytropic models.
• Here, we systematically examine the birth, evolution and collapse of accreting non-rotating supermassive stars under accretion rates of 0.01-10 solar masses per year, using the stellar evolution code KEPLER.