Black Hole Formation and Explosion from Rapidly Rotating Very Massive Stars

TL;DR

This study investigates the collapse of rapidly rotating very massive Population III stars, revealing black hole formation, torus-driven outflows, and potential gravitational wave signals, advancing understanding of early universe stellar evolution.

Contribution

It presents the first axisymmetric numerical relativity simulations of pair-instability collapse in rapidly rotating massive stars, highlighting torus formation and explosion mechanisms.

Findings

A ~10 solar mass torus forms around a ~130 solar mass black hole.

Rapid rotation leads to outflow driven by hydrodynamical effects.

Potential gravitational wave signals from black hole formation are identified.

Abstract

We explore the formation process of a black hole (BH) through the pair-instability collapse of a rotating Population III very massive star in axisymmetric numerical relativity. As the initial condition, we employ a progenitor star which is obtained by evolving a rapidly rotating zero-age main sequence (ZAMS) star with mass $320M_\odot$ until it reaches a pair instability region. We find that for such rapidly rotating model, a fraction of the mass, $\sim 10M_\odot$, forms a torus surrounding the remnant BH of mass $\sim 130M_\odot$ and an outflow is driven by a hydrodynamical effect. We also perform simulations, artificially reducing the initial angular velocity of the progenitor star, and find that only a small or no torus is formed and no outflow is driven. We discuss the possible evolution scenario of the remnant torus for the rapidly rotating model by considering the viscous and recombination effects and show that if the energy of $\sim 10^{52}$ erg is injected from the torus to the envelope, the luminosity and timescale of the explosion could be of the orders of $10^{43}$ erg/s and yrs, respectively. We also point out the possibility for observing gravitational waves associated with the BH formation for the rapidly rotating model by ground-based gravitational-wave detectors.