Probing the formation of the seeds of supermassive black holes with gravitational waves

TL;DR

This paper discusses how gravitational wave detection, especially via the ESA LISA mission, can reveal the origins and growth of seed black holes in the early universe, shedding light on supermassive black hole formation.

Contribution

It proposes using gravitational wave signals from seed black hole mergers to study their formation and evolution across cosmic history, highlighting the importance of LISA.

Findings

Gravitational waves can provide detailed information on black hole masses and spins.

LISA will be crucial in detecting signals from seed black hole mergers.

Seed black holes are key to understanding supermassive black hole origins.

Abstract

The existence of black holes in the intermediate mass interval between one hundred and ten thousand solar masses, filling the gap between the stellar and the supermassive black holes is a key prediction to explain the origin of luminous QSOs at redshifts as large as seven. There is a sheer difficulty in forming giant black holes of billion suns in less than one billion years. This has led to the concept of seed black holes. They are high redshift intermediate mass black holes that formed during cosmic dawn. Seeds are a transient population, which later grew massive through episodes of accretion and mergers. In this chapter we explore the possibility of discovering seed black holes and track their growth across all cosmic epoch, by detecting the gravitational wave signal they emit at the time of their coalescence, when they pair to form close binaries. We show that the ESA LISA mission for the detection of low frequency gravitational waves will be paramount in granting this insight. Gravitational waves travel unimpeded through the cosmos and carry exquisite information on the masses and spins of the merging black holes. To this purpose we introduce key concepts on the gravitational wave emission from binaries, describing briefly their formation pathway during halo mergers and galaxy collisions.