Formation of supermassive black hole seeds in nuclear star clusters via gas accretion and runaway collisions
Bibliographic record
Abstract
ABSTRACT More than 200 supermassive black holes (SMBHs) of masses $\gtrsim 10^9\, \mathrm{M_{\odot }}$ have been discovered at z ≳ 6. One promising pathway for the formation of SMBHs is through the collapse of supermassive stars (SMSs) with masses $\sim 10^{3}{-}10^{5} \, \mathrm{M_{\odot }}$ into seed black holes which could grow upto few times $10^9\, \mathrm{M_{\odot }}$ SMBHs observed at z ∼ 7. In this paper, we explore how SMSs with masses $\sim 10^{3}{-}10^{5} \, \mathrm{M_{\odot }}$ could be formed via gas accretion and runaway stellar collisions in high-redshift, metal-poor nuclear star clusters (NSCs) using idealized N-body simulations. We explore physically motivated accretion scenarios, e.g. Bondi–Hoyle–Lyttleton accretion and Eddington accretion, as well as simplified scenarios such as constant accretions. While gas is present, the accretion time-scale remains considerably shorter than the time-scale for collisions with the most massive object (MMO). However, overall the time-scale for collisions between any two stars in the cluster can become comparable or shorter than the accretion time-scale, hence collisions still play a crucial role in determining the final mass of the SMSs. We find that the problem is highly sensitive to the initial conditions and our assumed recipe for the accretion, due to the highly chaotic nature of the problem. The key variables that determine the mass growth mechanism are the mass of the MMO and the gas reservoir that is available for the accretion. Depending on different conditions, SMSs of masses $\sim 10^{3}{-}10^{5} \, \mathrm{M_{\odot }}$ can form for all three accretion scenarios considered in this work.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".