Envelope Winds as a Limiting Factor on Supermassive Black Hole Formation in Quasi-Stars

Present-day supermassive black holes (SMBHs) have no known formation mechanism that explains their mass and abundance. Typical stellar core collapse is limited, and subsequent accretion onto even the largest of collapsed stars is not sufficient to form an SMBH within a Hubble time. An alternative method of SMBH formation is direct collapse, wherein a disk of pre-galactic gas rapidly infalls to its center. Direct collapse occurs in a quasi-star, a theoretical star-like gaseous envelope supported by BH accretion rather than nuclear reactions. In this work, we have created numerical models of these quasi stars using the stellar evolution code MESA. We use these models to test the effects of envelope winds on SMBH formation. We find that winds place realistic constraints on the SMBH seeds that may result from quasi-stars.