Regan, John and Downes, Turlough P. and Volonteri, Marta and Beckmann, Ricarda and Lupi, Alessandro and Trebitsch, Maxime and Dubois, Yohan (2019) Super-Eddington accretion and feedback from the first massive seed black holes. Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society, 486 (3). pp. 3892-3906. ISSN 1365-2966

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Abstract

Super-Eddington accretion onto massive black hole seeds may be commonplace in the early Universe, where the conditions exist for rapid accretion. Direct collapse black holes are often invoked as a possible solution to the observation of super massive black holes (SMBHs) in the pre-reionisation Universe. We investigate here how feedback, mainly in the form of bipolar jets, from super-Eddington accreting seed black holes will affect their subsequent growth. We find that, nearly independent of the mass loading of the bipolar jets, the violent outflows generated by the jets evacuate a region of approximately 0.1 pc surrounding the black hole seed. However, the jet outflows are unable to break free of the halo and their impact is limited to the immediate vicinity of the black hole. The outflows suppress any accretion for approximately a dynamical time. The gas then cools, recombines and falls back to the centre where high accretion rates are again observed. The overall effect is to create an effective accretion rate with values of between 0.1 and 0.5 times the Eddington rate. If this episodic accretion rate is maintained for order 500 million years then the black hole will increase in mass by a factor of between 3 and 300 but far short of the factor of 104 required for the seeds to become the SMBHs observed at z > 6. Therefore, direct collapse black holes born into atomic cooling haloes and which experience strong negative mechanical feedback will require external influences (e.g. rapid major mergers with other haloes) to promote efficient accretion and reach SMBH masses within a few hundred million years.

Item Type:	Article
Additional Information:	Cite as: John A Regan, Turlough P Downes, Marta Volonteri, Ricarda Beckmann, Alessandro Lupi, Maxime Trebitsch, Yohan Dubois, Super-Eddington accretion and feedback from the first massive seed black holes, Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society, Volume 486, Issue 3, July 2019, Pages 3892–3906, https://doi.org/10.1093/mnras/stz1045
Keywords:	Cosmology; theory; large-scale structure; first stars; methods: numerical; large-scale structure of Universe, cosmology: theory;
Academic Unit:	Faculty of Science and Engineering > Research Institutes > Hamilton Institute Faculty of Science and Engineering > Theoretical Physics
Item ID:	13802
Identification Number:	https://doi.org/10.1093/mnras/stz1045
Depositing User:	John Regan
Date Deposited:	12 Jan 2021 17:37
Journal or Publication Title:	Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society
Publisher:	Oxford University Press
Refereed:	Yes
URI:	Publisher Organisation
Use Licence:	This item is available under a Creative Commons Attribution Non Commercial Share Alike Licence (CC BY-NC-SA). Details of this licence are available here

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