Journal article
Fluctuations in the high-redshift Lyman-Werner background: Close halo pairs as the origin of supermassive black holes
M Dijkstra, Z Haiman, A Mesinger, JSB Wyithe
Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society | Published : 2008
Abstract
The earliest generation of stars and black holes must have established an early 'Lyman-Werner' background (LWB) at high redshift, prior to the epoch of reionization. Because of the long mean free path of photons with energies hν 99 per cent of the DM haloes are illuminated by an LW flux within a factor of 2 of the global mean value. However, a small fraction, ∼10-8 to 10-6, of DM haloes with virial temperatures Tvir ≳ 104 K have a close luminous neighbour within ≲10 kpc, and are exposed to an LW flux exceeding the global mean by a factor of >20, or to J21,LW > 103 (in units of 10-21 erg s-1 Hz-1 sr-1 cm-2). This large LW flux can photodissociate H 2 molecules in the gas collapsing due to ato..
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Awarded by NASA through Hubble Fellowship
Funding Acknowledgements
MD is supported by Harvard University funds. ZH acknowledges support by the Polanyi Program of the Hungarian National Office of Technology. JSBW acknowledges the support of the ARC. Partial support for this work was also provided by NASA through Hubble Fellowship grant # HF-01222.01 to AM, awarded by the Space Telescope Science Institute, which is operated by the Association of Universities for Research in Astronomy, Inc., for NASA, under contract NAS 5-26555.