Black Hole Formation and Explosion from Rapidly Rotating Very Massive Stars

Abstract

We explore the formation process of a black hole (BH) through the pair-instability collapse of a rotating Population III very massive star in axisymmetric numerical relativity. As the initial condition, we employ a progenitor star that is obtained by evolving a rapidly rotating zero-age main-sequence star with mass 320 M ⊙ until it reaches a pair-instability region. We find that for such a rapidly rotating model, a fraction of the mass, ∼10 M ⊙ , forms a torus surrounding the remnant BH of mass ∼130 M ⊙ , and an outflow is driven by a hydrodynamical effect. We also perform simulations, artificially reducing the initial angular velocity of the progenitor star, and find that only a small or no torus is formed and no outflow is driven. We discuss the possible evolution scenario of the remnant torus for the rapidly rotating model by considering the viscous and recombination effects and show that if an energy of ∼10 52 erg is injected from the torus to the envelope, the luminosity and timescale of the explosion could be of the orders of 10 43 erg s −1 and years, respectively. We also point out the possibility for observing gravitational waves associated with the BH formation for the rapidly rotating model by ground-based gravitational-wave detectors.