Formation of supermassive black holes in galactic nuclei – I. Delivering seed intermediate-mass black holes in massive stellar clusters

Supermassive Black Holes in Galactic Nuclei

We discuss the link between the observations of distant quasars and those of massive dark objects in the cores of many local galaxies. We show how the formation of early black holes gives rise to the luminosity function of high z quasars, while it imprints into their dark local relics a related shape of the mass-dispersion correlation. We propose that in its lower section the correlation slope ...

Supermassive Black Holes in Galactic Nuclei

We review the motivation and search for supermassive black holes (BHs) in galaxies. Energetic nuclear activity provides indirect but compelling evidence for BH engines. Ground-based dynamical searches for central dark objects are reviewed in Kormendy & Richstone (1995, ARA&A, 33, 581). Here we provide an update of results from the Hubble Space Telescope (HST). This has greatly accelerated the d...

Supermassive Black Holes in Active Galactic Nuclei

Massive Black Holes in Star Clusters. I. Equal-mass clusters

In this paper we report results of collisional N -body simulations of the dynamical evolution of equal-mass star clusters containing a massive central black hole. Each cluster is composed of between 5,000 to 180,000 stars together with a central black hole which contains between 0.2% to 10% of the total cluster mass. We find that for large enough black hole masses, the central density follows a...

Active Galactic Nuclei with Candidate Intermediate-mass Black Holes

We present an initial sample of 19 intermediate-mass black hole candidates in active galactic nuclei culled from the First Data Release of the Sloan Digital Sky Survey. Using the linewidth-luminosity-mass scaling relation established for broad-line active nuclei, we estimate black hole masses in the range of MBH ≈ 8× 104 − 106 M⊙, a regime in which only two objects are currently known. The abso...