A Vast Population of Wandering Intermediate-Mass Black Holes in Cosmological Simulations

Understanding the origins of massive black holes in galaxies goes hand in hand with understanding the origins of other structures in the cosmic web. Hydrodynamic cosmological simulations self-consistently combine the process of structure formation at cosmological scales with the physics of smaller, galaxy scales. MBHs are not born “massive” but grow by several orders of magnitude from “seed” black holes. Gas accretion and black hole mergers are the drivers of their growth inside galaxies. I will explore the use of simulations to investigate the population of intermediate black holes arising from seed BHs and their relation to a ‘wandering’ black hole population in galaxies. GW signals from coalescing massive black holes on all mass scales include mergers with wandering, remnant seed IMBHs.