| dc.description.abstract | Observations of distant quasars indicate that supermassive black
holes of billions of solar masses already existed less than a billion
years after the Big Bang1. Models in which the ‘seeds’ of such black
holes form by the collapse of primordial metal-free stars2,3 cannot
explain the rapid appearance of these supermassive black holes
because gas accretion is not sufficiently efficient4–6. Alternatively,
these black holes may formby direct collapse of gas within isolated
protogalaxies7,8, but current models require idealized conditions,
such as metal-free gas, to prevent cooling and star formation from
consuming the gas reservoir9–11. Here we report simulations showing
that mergers between massive protogalaxies naturally produce
the conditions for direct collapse into a supermassive black hole
with no need to suppress cooling and star formation. Mergerdriven
gas inflows give rise to an unstable, massive nuclear gas disk
of a few billion solar masses, which funnels more than 108 solar
masses of gas to a sub-parsec-scale gas cloud in only 100,000 years.
The cloud undergoes gravitational collapse, which eventually leads
to the formation of a massive black hole. The black hole can subsequently
grow to a billion solar masses on timescales of about 108
years by accreting gas from the surrounding disk | |
