Impact of baryonic streaming velocities on the formation of supermassive black holes via direct collapse

Abstract

Baryonic streaming motions produced prior to the epoch of recombination became supersonic during the cosmic dark ages. Various studies suggest that such streaming velocities change the halo statistics and also influence the formation of Population III stars. In this study, we aim to explore the impact of streaming velocities on the formation of supermassive black holes at z>10 via the direct collapse scenario. To accomplish this goal, we perform cosmological large eddy simulations for two haloes of a few times 107M⊙ with initial streaming velocities of 3, 6 and 9 km s-1. These massive primordial haloes illuminated by the strong Lyman-Werner flux are the potential cradles for the formation of direct collapse seed black holes. To study the evolution for longer times, we employ sink particles and track the accretion for 10 000 years. Our findings show that higher streaming velocities increase the circular velocities from about 14 to 16 km s-1. They also delay the collapse of haloes for a few million years, but do not have any significant impact on the halo properties such as turbulent energy, radial velocity, density and accretion rates. Sink particles of about ~105M⊙ are formed at the end of our simulations and no clear distribution of sink masses is observed in the presence of streaming motions. It is further found that the impact of streaming velocities is less severe in massive haloes compared to the minihaloes as reported in the previous studies. © 2014 The Authors Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the Royal Astronomical Society.