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The origins of massive black holes

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arxiv 2110.10175 v2 pith:X3QTWHIN submitted 2021-10-19 astro-ph.GA

The origins of massive black holes

classification astro-ph.GA
keywords blackmbhsholesmassiveoriginsseedsformationhole
verification ladder T0 review T1 audit T2 compute T3 formal T4 reserved
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Massive black holes (MBHs) inhabit galaxy centers, power luminous quasars and Active Galactic Nuclei (AGN) and shape their cosmic environment with the energy they produce. The origins of MBHs remain a mystery and the recent detection by LIGO/Virgo of an almost 150 solar mass black hole has revitalized the question of whether there is a continuum between "stellar" and "massive" black holes and what the seeds of MBHs are. Seeds could have formed in the first galaxies, or could be also related to the collapse of horizon-sized regions in the early Universe. Understanding the origins of MBHs straddles fundamental physics, cosmology and astrophysics and it bridges the fields of gravitational wave physics and traditional astronomy. With several facilities in the next 10-15 years we foresee the possibility of discovering MBHs' avenues of formation. In this article we link three main topics: the channels of black hole seed formation, the journey from seeds to massive black holes, the diagnostics on the origins of MBHs. We highlight and critically discuss current unsolved problems and touch on recent developments that stirred the community.

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Forward citations

Cited by 7 Pith papers

Reviewed papers in the Pith corpus that reference this work. Sorted by Pith novelty score.

  1. BlackTHUNDER Reveals a Massive Filament around a Compact AGN at $z\simeq5.23$

    astro-ph.GA 2026-07 conditional novelty 6.5

    GN-77652, a compact broad-line AGN at z=5.229, lies beside a 12 kpc multi-source filament at the same redshift whose coalescence will erase the compact AGN appearance within ~150–440 Myr.

  2. Life After the Quasar: Overmassive Black Holes and Remnant Ionised Bubbles in and Around Two z~6.6 Galaxies

    astro-ph.GA 2026-05 unverdicted novelty 6.0

    Two z~6.6 galaxies host overmassive black holes and show remnant ionized bubbles from recent quasar episodes, with BH-to-stellar mass ratios 400-800 times above the local relation.

  3. Direct Collapse Black Hole Candidates from Decaying Dark Matter

    hep-ph 2025-09 unverdicted novelty 6.0

    Axion dark matter decay injects 1-13.6 eV photons that suppress H2, enabling atomic cooling halos and direct collapse black hole seeds for axion masses 24.5-26.5 eV and couplings down to 4e-12/GeV.

  4. Dark matter production from evaporation of regular primordial black holes

    hep-ph 2025-10 unverdicted novelty 5.0

    Regular primordial black holes can evaporate completely like singular ones and yield the observed dark matter density under modified cosmological constraints.

  5. Constraints on the extreme mass-ratio inspiral population from LISA data

    gr-qc 2025-08 unverdicted novelty 5.0

    A neural-network-accelerated hierarchical Bayesian pipeline is developed and validated on a phenomenological model to constrain EMRI population parameters from LISA data.

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    astro-ph.CO 2026-06 unverdicted novelty 4.0

    MCMC comparison of projected PBH correlation functions with z≈6 quasar angular auto-correlation data yields posterior constraints f_PBH∼10^{-3}, m_PBH∼10^{12}M_⊙ for Poisson models and ξ_eff≃2.1, r_cl≃76 Mpc for clust...

  7. Estimation of black hole spins in low-mass AGNs and comparison with other types of AGNs

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    Spins of low-mass AGN black holes decrease with mass, supporting mergers or chaotic accretion as growth mechanisms and suggesting an evolutionary sequence where spins first decrease then slowly increase.