Understand
The presence of massive black holes (BHs) with masses of order $10^9\rm\, M_\odot$, powering bright quasars when the Universe was less than 1 Gyr old, poses strong constraints on their formation mechanism.
- Several scenarios have been proposed to date to explain massive BH formation, from the low-mass seed BH remnants of the first generation of stars to the massive seed BHs resulting from the rapid collapse of massive gas clouds.
- However, the plausibility of some of these scenarios to occur within the progenitors of high-z quasars has not yet been thoroughly explored.
- In this work, we investigate, by combining dark-matter only N-body simulations with a semi-analytic framework, whether the conditions for the formation of massive seed BHs from synchronised atomic-cooling halo pairs and/or dynamically-heated mini-haloes are fulfilled in the overdense regions where the progenitors of a typical high-redshift quasar host form and evolve.