Sowing Black Hole Seeds: Direct Collapse Black Hole Formation with Realistic Lyman–Werner Radiation in Cosmological Simulations

The detection of quasars at redshifts 6 and beyond indicate that the first black holes formed early and grew to a million to a billion times the mass of the Sun within the first billion years after the Big Bang. We study the demographics of direct collapse massive black hole seed formation sites in the context of a cosmological SPH+N-body simulation with self-consistent, time-dependent, non-uniform Lyman-Werner radiation.