The erratic dynamical life of black hole seeds in high-redshift galaxies

Understand

The dynamics of black hole seeds in high redshift galaxies is key to understand their ability to grow via accretion and to pair in close binaries during galactic mergers.

• To properly follow the dynamics of black holes we develop a physically motivated model to capture unresolved dynamical friction from stars, dark matter and gas.
• We first validate the model and then we use it to investigate the dynamics of seed black holes born at $z\sim9$ in dwarf proto-galaxies.
• We perform a suite of zoom cosmological simulations with spatial resolution as high as 10 pc and with a stellar and dark matter mass resolution of $2\times10^3 \, \textrm{M}_\odot$ and $2\times10^5 \, \textrm{M}_\odot$ respectively.