Hyper-Eddington Black Hole Growth in Star-Forming Molecular Clouds and Galactic Nuclei: Can It Happen?

TL;DR

This study uses high-resolution simulations to investigate conditions under which stellar-mass black hole seeds can undergo rapid, hyper-Eddington growth in dense, star-forming molecular clouds, potentially forming intermediate-mass black holes.

Contribution

It demonstrates that dense, star-forming environments with specific feedback conditions enable runaway black hole growth, providing new criteria for super-Eddington accretion in galactic centers.

Findings

Dense clouds with high surface density promote BH growth.

Stellar feedback can both disrupt and facilitate black hole accretion.

Runaway growth is nearly independent of initial BH mass under certain conditions.

Abstract

Formation of supermassive black holes (BHs) remains a theoretical challenge. In many models, especially beginning from stellar relic "seeds," this requires sustained super-Eddington accretion. While studies have shown BHs can violate the Eddington limit on accretion disk scales given sufficient "fueling" from larger scales, what remains unclear is whether or not BHs can actually capture sufficient gas from their surrounding ISM. We explore this in a suite of multi-physics high-resolution simulations of BH growth in magnetized, star-forming dense gas complexes including dynamical stellar feedback from radiation, stellar mass-loss, and supernovae, exploring populations of seeds with masses $\sim 1-10^{4}\,M_{\odot}$. In this initial study, we neglect feedback from the BHs: so this sets a strong upper limit to the accretion rates seeds can sustain. We show that stellar feedback plays a key role. Complexes with gravitational pressure/surface density below $\sim 10^{3}\,M_{\odot}\,{\rm pc^{-2}}$ are disrupted with low star formation efficiencies so provide poor environments for BH growth. But in denser cloud complexes, early stellar feedback does not rapidly destroy the clouds but does generate strong shocks and dense clumps, allowing $\sim 1\%$ of randomly-initialized seeds to encounter a dense clump with low relative velocity and produce runaway, hyper-Eddington accretion (growing by orders of magnitude). Remarkably, mass growth under these conditions is almost independent of initial BH mass, allowing rapid IMBH formation even for stellar-mass seeds. This defines a necessary (but perhaps not sufficient) set of criteria for runaway BH growth: we provide analytic estimates for the probability of runaway growth under different ISM conditions.