|
The First Stars and Galaxies: Challenges for the Next Decade Participants
Contact: |
Talk
Title: Accretion Physics for the First Massive Black Holes Author(s): Milos Milosavljevic Abstract: Black holes at least as massive as a million solar masses inhabit the centers of all but the smallest of galaxies. Billion solar mass black holes were present when the universe was at a tenth of its present age. How did such extreme objects emerge so early onto the cosmic stage? Any attempt to trace their evolution to the beginnings quickly leads to daunting theoretical challenges: accretion must proceed on length scales spanning as many as fifteen orders of magnitude. The black holes that form in the aftermath of stellar collapse face particular obstacles on their path to becoming massive. The possibility of a head start, in the form of a prompt formation in the super-stellar-mass range, would be exciting. I will discuss the radiatively-efficient and the radiatively-inefficient scenarios, and for the latter, I will attempt to gain insight from the empirically rich physics of the cosmic gamma-ray burst sources.
|