IS THERE A MAXIMUM MASS FOR BLACK HOLES IN GALACTIC NUCLEI?

ABSTRACT The largest observed supermassive black holes (SMBHs) have a mass of , nearly independent of redshift, from the local ( ) to the early ( ) universe. We suggest that the growth of SMBHs above a few is prevented by small-scale accretion physics, independent of the properties of their host galaxies or of cosmology. Growing more massive BHs requires a gas supply rate from galactic scales onto a nuclear region as high as . At such a high accretion rate, most of the gas converts to stars at large radii (∼10-100 pc), well before reaching the BH. We adopt a simple model for a star-forming accretion disk and find that the accretion rate in the subparsec nuclear region is reduced to the smaller value of at most a few . This prevents SMBHs from growing above in the age of the universe. Furthermore, once an SMBH reaches a sufficiently high mass, this rate falls below the critical value at which the accretion flow becomes advection dominated. Once this transition occurs, BH feeding can be suppressed by strong outflows and jets from hot gas near the BH. We find that the maximum SMBH mass, given by this transition, is between , depending primarily on the efficiency of angular momentum transfer inside the galactic disk, and not on other properties of the host galaxy.