THE FIRST MASSIVE BLACK HOLE SEEDS AND THEIR HOSTS

We investigate the formation of the first massive black holes (MBHs) in high redshift galaxies, with the goal of providing insights to which galaxies do or do not host MBHs. We adopt a novel approach to forming seed black holes in galaxy halos in cosmological SPH+N-body simulations. The formation of MBH seeds is dictated directly by the local gas density, temperature, and metallicity, and motivated by physical models of MBH formation. We …