Growth of Early Supermassive Black Holes and the High-Redshift Eddington Ratio Distribution

TL;DR

This study uses a large hydrodynamic cosmological simulation to analyze early supermassive black hole growth, revealing a peak in Eddington ratios linked to specific mass ranges and redshifts, with implications for modeling black hole evolution.

Contribution

It introduces a new simulation-based analysis of high-redshift black hole growth, providing a log-normal distribution model for Eddington ratios as a function of mass and redshift.

Findings

Peak Eddington ratio at black hole masses of 4-8 x 10^7 solar masses

Eddington ratio distribution is approximately log-normal

Eddington ratio scales with (1+z)^3 due to cosmological density

Abstract

Using a new large-scale (~ 0.75 Gpc)^3 hydrodynamic cosmological simulation we investigate the growth rate of supermassive black holes in the early universe (z > 4.75). Remarkably, we find a clear peak in the typical Eddington ratio at black hole masses of 4-8 * 10^7 solar masses (typically found in halos of ~7 * 10^11 to 10^12 solar masses), independent of redshift and indicative that most of BH growth occurs in the cold-flow dominated regime. Black hole growth is by and large regulated by the evolution of gas density. The typical Eddington ratio at a given mass scales simply as cosmological density (1+z)^3 and the peak is caused by the competition between increased gas density available in more massive hosts, and a decrease due to strong AGN feedback that deprives the black hole of sufficient gas to fuel further rapid growth in the high mass end. In addition to evolution in the mean Eddington ratio, we show that the distribution of Eddington ratio among both mass-selected and luminosity-selected samples is approximately log-normal. We combine these findings into a single log-normal fitting formula for the distribution of Eddington ratios as a function of (M_BH,z). This formula can be used in analytic and semi analytic models for evolving black hole populations, predicting black hole masses of observed quasars, and, in conjunction with the observed distribution of Eddington ratios, can be used to constrain the black hole mass function.