Accretion onto the First Stellar Mass Black Holes

TL;DR

This study uses advanced simulations to show that early stellar black holes have limited mass growth due to radiative feedback, but significantly influence their environment and star formation in the early universe.

Contribution

First simulation including radiative feedback effects on accretion onto first stellar black holes, revealing limited growth and environmental impact.

Findings

Radiative feedback suppresses black hole growth.

Black holes significantly heat surrounding gas.

Star formation is prevented in the host minihalo for 200 million years.

Abstract

The first stars in the universe, forming at redshifts z>15 in minihalos with masses of order 10^6 Msun, may leave behind black holes as their remnants. These objects could conceivably serve as "seeds" for much larger black holes observed at redshifts z~6. We study the growth of the remnant black holes through accretion including for the first time the emitted accretion radiation with adaptive mesh refinement cosmological radiation-hydrodynamical simulations. The effects of photo-ionization and heating dramatically affect the accretion flow from large scales, resulting in negligible mass growth of the black hole. We compare cases with the accretion luminosity included and neglected to show that the accretion radiation drastically changes the environment within 100 pc of the black hole, where gas temperatures are increased by an order of magnitude. The gas densities are reduced and further star formation in the same minihalo prevented for the two hundred million years of evolution we followed. These calculations show that even without the radiative feedback included most seed black holes do not gain mass as efficiently as has been hoped for in previous theories, implying that black hole remnants of Pop III stars that formed in minihalos are not likely to be the origin of miniquasars. Most importantly, however, these calculations demonstrate that if early stellar mass black holes are indeed accreting close to the Bondi-Hoyle rate with ten percent efficiency they have a dramatic local effect in regulating star formation in the first galaxies.