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The First Stars and Galaxies: Challenges for the Next Decade Participants
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Talk
Title: The Origin and Detection of High-Redshift Supermassive Black Holes Author(s): Zoltan Haiman Abstract: Supermassive black holes (SMBHs) are common in local galactic nuclei, and SMBHs as massive as several billion solar masses already exist at redshift z=6. The earliest SMBHs may arise by the combination of Eddington-limited growth and mergers of stellar-mass seed BHs, left behind by the first generation of metal-free stars, or by the rapid direct collapse of gas in rare special environments where the gas can avoid fragmenting into stars. I will review these two competing scenarios, and discuss how they may be distinguished in future observations.
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