BLACK HOLES AND THE TURBULENT ORIGINS OF THE FIRST QUASARS

Although supermassive black holes (SMBHs) have been found at the centers of most massive galaxies today, over 300 have now been discovered at redshifts z > 6, or less than a billion years after the Big Bang.  How such massive BHs formed by such early epochs posed significant challenges to current paradigms of cosmological structure formation.  I will present new numerical simulations that resolve this conundrum by showing that SMBHs could form by 650 Myr after the Big Bang in highly turbulent cosmological haloes fed by unusually cold accretion streams.  This discovery not only explains how quasars formed by such early times but also accounts for their demographics -- their numbers at high redshift.  I will conclude with a short discussion on the earliest BH found to date: UHZ1, a 40 million solar mass BH at z = 10.1, or 450 Myr after the Big Bang