Scientific Poster on Supermassive Black Holes (2015)

Scientific poster presenting and illustrating my research, which is published as:

Effects of turbulence and rotation on protostar formation as a precursor of massive black holes, Van Borm, C., Bovino, S., Latif, M. A., Schleicher, D. R. G., Spaans, M. & Grassi, T. 2014, A&A, 572, A22

Short summary     Observational evidence suggests that some very large supermassive black holes (SMBHs) already existed less than 1 billion years after the Big Bang. Explaining the formation and growth of the ‘seeds’ of these SMBHs is quite challenging. We explore the formation of such seeds in the direct collapse scenario. Using 3D hydrodynamical simulations, we investigate the impact of turbulence and rotation on the fragmentation behavior of collapsing primordial gas in the presence of a strong UV radiation background, which keeps the gas hot.

The results section of the poster shows a large graph, depicting the growth in density as the object we follow collapses to increasingly smaller scales. Around it, projections of the 3D density field at different scales are shown to illustrate some specific effects.

SMBH Poster (3D simulation results)

(2015)