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Formation of Supermassive Stars and the Direct Collapse to Black Holes

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  29 August 2024

John A. Regan Open the ORCID record for John A. Regan [Opens in a new window]
John A. Regan*
Affiliation:
Department of Theoretical Physics, Maynooth University Maynooth, Ireland
*
email: [email protected]
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Abstract

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Supermassive stars represent a promising avenue for seeding the (super-)massive black holes observed in the centres of massive galaxies. In these proceedings I review the motivation on the need for supermassive stars as a progenitor pathway for seeding massive black holes. I discuss the currently understood limitations of seeds produced by less massive stars (i.e. remnants from the first generation of stars) and advocate that more massive stars - with masses up to M∗ ∼ 105Mȯ - formed under the conditions of hierarchical structure formation, in rare haloes, are the favoured pathway. Finally, I discuss some recent high resolution simulations demonstrating the formation of supermassive stars in early galaxies.

Keywords

Massive Black HolesEarly UniverseSupermassive Stars
Type
Contributed Paper
Information
Proceedings of the International Astronomical Union , Volume 18 , Symposium S361: Massive Stars Near and Far , May 2022 , pp. 539 - 549
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This is an Open Access article, distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution licence (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted re-use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.
Copyright
© The Author(s), 2024. Published by Cambridge University Press on behalf of International Astronomical Union

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