
Zooming in on the first black holes
Observed with masses in excess of a billion solar masses, at a time when the universe was only about a billion years old, the origin of the first supermassive black holes remains an unsolved question today. In the face of few observations from this era, simulations provide one tool to study the origin of these black holes. However, simulating the immediate black hole environment, without loosing the galactic and cosmological context, remains a huge computational challenge. I have worked extensively on extending the range of scales covered in a single simulation, to allow a detailed study of black hole evolution in a the context of their rapidly changing environment in the early universe.
More on the black hole zoom project