Max Planck Institute for Radio Astronomy/Argelander Institute for Astronomy Main Colloquium
Titel: Origin of supermassive black holes – an astrophysical assessment of possible formation channels
Speaker: Prof. Dominik Schleicher, Dipartimento di Fisica – Sapienza, Università di Roma
Theoretical models and observational data provide strong support for the origin of supermassive black holes via collision-based formation channels. An analysis of Nuclear Star Clusters in the Local Universe suggests that these are stable when the typical collision timescales are much longer compared ot the ages of these systems. We present here a suite of numerical simulations designed to test this scenario, where we widely vary the typical collision timescales as compared to the ages of the system. Our results show that the efficiency to form central massive objects strongly depends on the ratio of cluster ages over collision timescales, which can be expressed in relation to a typical mass scale for collisions. We present some of the largest recently pursued N-body simulations designed to verify this scenario, showing the efficient formation of a supermassive black hole with more than 20.000 solar masses through stellar collisions. We compare our results with the Young Massive Star Clusters detected in high-redshift galaxies via the James Webb Space Telescope, providing an expected relation between the masses of these clusters and the massive black holes forming within them. We further show and discuss how the presence of gas may alter the predictions from the N-body simulations.