Statistical predictions for the first black holes

Understand

The recent observations of supermassive black holes (SMBHs) at high redshift challenge our understanding of their formation and growth.

• There are different proposed pathways to form black hole (BH) seeds, such as the remnants of the first stars (chapter 4), gas-dynamical processes (chapter 5), direct collapse (chapter 6), or stellar collisions in dense nuclear clusters (chapter 7).
• In this chapter, we discuss the probability of forming supermassive black holes (SMBHs) via these channels and determine the expected number density of the BH seeds.
• We start with a brief discussion of the observational constraints on SMBHs at low and high redshift that theoretical models have to reproduce (a more detailed account is provided in chapter 12).