HIGH-z QUASARS IN THE Rh = ct UNIVERSE

One cannot understand the early appearance of 10(9)M(circle dot) supermassive black holes without invoking anomalously high accretion rates or the creation of exotically massive seeds, neither of which is seen in the local universe. Recent observations have compounded this problem by demonstrating that most, if not all, of the high-z quasars appear to be accreting at the Eddington limit. In the context of Lambda CDM, the only viable alternative now appears to be the assemblage of supermassive black holes via mergers, as long as the seeds started forming at redshifts > 40, but ceased being created by z similar to 20-30. In this paper, we show that, whereas the high-z quasars may be difficult to explain within the framework of the standard model, they can instead be interpreted much more sensibly in the context of the R-h = ct universe. In this cosmology, 5-20 M-circle dot seeds produced after the onset of re-ionization (at z less than or similar to 15) could have easily grown to M greater than or similar to 10(9) M-circle dot by z greater than or similar to 6, merely by accreting at the standard Eddington rate.