Coffee/tea and cookies will be served in the coffee lounge of 52 Hillhouse starting at 2 PM
How do the supermassive black holes at z> 6 come about? The observations of Quasars hint at the fact that a billion solar mass black holes already exist in the first billion years of our Universe’s evolution. I will speak about the possibility of seeding these beasts via massive direct collapse black holes with masses > 10,000 Msun that form out of pristine atomic cooling gas. The specific conditions under which we expect these black holes to form has undergone major revision in the past year, thus warranting the need for a revision in theoretical models that study their formation in a cosmological volume. I will also chart out our strategy to observe them at z > 6 via both direct and in-direct methods in the already existing Hubble and Chandra data.