Relativistic Collapse of Rotating Supermassive Stars to Supermassive Black Holes

There is compelling evidence that supermassive black holes (SMBHs) exist. Yet the origin of these objects, or their seeds, is still unknown. We are performing general relativistic simulations of gravitational collapse to black holes in different scenarios to help reveal how SMBH seeds might arise in the universe. SMBHs with ~ 10^9 solar masses must have formed by z > 6, or within 10^9 yrs after the Big Bang, to power quasars. It may be difficult for gas accretion to build up such a SMBH by this time unless the initial seed black hole already has a substantial mass. One plausible progenitor of a massive seed black hole is a supermassive star (SMS). We have followed the collapse of a SMS to a SMBH by means of 3D hydrodynamic simulations in post-Newtonian gravity and axisymmetric simulations in full general relativity. The initial SMS of arbitrary mass M in these simulations rotates uniformly at the mass--shedding limit and is marginally unstable to radial collapse. The final black hole mass and spin are determined to be M_h/M ~ 0.9 and J_h/M_h^2 ~ 0.75. The remaining mass goes into a disk of mass M_{disk}/M ~ 0.1. This disk arises even though the total spin of the progenitor star, J/M^2 = 0.97, is safely below the Kerr limit. The collapse generates a mild burst of gravitational radiation. Nonaxisymmetric bars or one-armed spirals may arise during the quasi-stationary evolution of a SMS, during its collapse, or in the ambient disk about the hole, and are potential sources of quasi-periodic waves, detectable by LISA.Comment: 11 pages, to appear in "The Astrophysics of Gravitational Wave Sources", Proceedings of a Workshop held at the University of Maryland in April 2003, ed. J. Centrella, AIP, in pres