Seeds Don't Sink: Even Massive Black Hole "Seeds" Cannot Migrate to Galaxy Centers Efficiently

TL;DR

This study shows that most seed black holes in early galaxies cannot efficiently migrate to the center due to complex dynamics, challenging common assumptions about supermassive black hole formation.

Contribution

The paper combines high-resolution cosmological simulations with new dynamical friction estimators to analyze seed black hole sinking efficiency in high-redshift galaxies.

Findings

Seed BHs less than 10^8 M_sun cannot efficiently sink in typical high-z galaxies.

Increasing seed numbers or embedding in dense structures may help seeds reach galaxy centers.

Most seed black holes are unlikely to reach the galactic center via dynamical friction.

Abstract

Possible formation scenarios of supermassive black holes in the early universe include rapid growth from less massive seed black holes (BHs) via super-Eddington accretion or runaway mergers, yet both of these scenarios would require seed BHs to efficiently sink to and be trapped in the galactic center via dynamical friction. This may not be true for their complicated dynamics in clumpy high-$z$ galaxies. In this work we study this "sinking problem" with state-of-the-art high-resolution cosmological simulations, combined with both direct $N$-body integration of seed BH trajectories and post-processing of randomly generated test particles with a newly developed dynamical friction estimator. We find that seed BHs less massive than $10^8\,M_\odot$ (i.e., all but the already-supermassive seeds) cannot efficiently sink in typical high-$z$ galaxies. We also discuss two possible solutions: dramatically increasing the number of seeds such that one seed can end up trapped in the galactic center by chance, or seed BHs being embedded in dense structures (e.g. star clusters) with effective masses above the mass threshold. We discuss the limitations of both solutions.