Formation of Supermassive Black Holes: Simulations in General Relativity

There is compelling evidence that supermassive black holes exist. Yet the origin of these objects, or their seeds, is still unknown. We discuss several plausible scenarios for forming the seeds of supermassive black holes. These include the catastrophic collapse of supermassive stars, the collapse of relativistic clusters of collisionless particles or stars, the gravothermal evolution of dense clusters of ordinary stars or stellar-mass compact objects, and the gravothermal evolution of self-interacting dark matter halos. Einstein’s equations of general relativity are required to describe key facets of these scenarios, and large-scale numerical simulations are performed to solve them.