Million solar mass black holes at high redshift

Abstract

The existence of quasars at redshift z > 5 indicates that supermassive black holes were present since the very early times. If they grew by accretion, the seeds of mass ~ 10^5 Msun must have formed at z ~ 9. These seed black holes may result from the collapse and dissipation of primordial gas during the early stages of galaxy formation. I discuss the effects of magnetic fields on the fragmentation of cold gas clouds embedded into a hot diffuse phase and a virialized dark matter halo. The field of 10^-4 G ejected by supernova remnants can halt cloud break-up at 10^4 Msun. High star formation rates keep the clouds partially ionized, making ambipolar diffusion inefficient. The magnetically-supported clouds collapse into black holes, which later spiral via dynamical friction into a central cluster with the total mass Mbh ~ 6 10^6 Msun. As the cluster collapses, the black holes merge emitting gravitational radiation that should be detectable by LISA.