James Webb Space Telescope Feed Post

Harvard ADS: Sub-Eddington accreting supermassive primordial black holes explain Little Red Dots

Paper abstract: The James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) has uncovered an abundant population of compact, extremely red, and X-ray weak objects at z\gtrsim4, knows as ``Little Red Dots" (LRDs). These objects exhibit spectral energy distributions that resemble both active galactic nuclei (AGN) and stellar population templates. However, whether dominated by AGN activity or compact star formation, the high redshifts and masses/luminosities of LRDs, coupled with their significant abundance, present potential challenges to the standard \LambdaCDM model. In this work, we proposes a novel cosmic interpretation of this anomaly, suggesting that these LRDs are likely massive galaxies seeded by supermassive primordial black holes (SMPBHs) came into being in the very early universe. We analyze 434 known LRDs from the 0.54 {\rm deg}^2 COSMOS-Web survey and test the hypothesis that they originated from SMPBHs assuming sub-Eddington accretion. According to our result, SMPBHs actually could lead to the existence of more LRDs, even at higher redshifts (z>8).