How Overmassive Black Holes Formed at Cosmic Dawn

Abstract

Overmassive black hole galaxies (OBGs) at redshifts $z \sim$ 10, or 450 Myr after the Big Bang, are one of the most puzzling discoveries by the James Webb Space Telescope to date because they formed by such early epochs and their black-hole to stellar mass ratios are a hundred times higher than those in galaxies today. Here we show that OBGs are simply the result of DCBH birth in primordial halos at early times. A 70,000 M$_{\odot}$ DCBH forming at $z =$ 25.7 in our cosmological simulation grows at about half the Eddington rate to $6.0 \times 10^6$ M$_{\odot}$ by $z =$ 10.1. Its host galaxy reaches a stellar mass of $4 \times 10^8$ M$_{\odot}$, a metallicity $Z =$ 0.1 Z$_{\odot}$, a star formation rate of 2 M$_{\odot}$ yr$^{-1}$, and $M_{\rm BH}/M_{\ast}$ $\sim$ 0.01, on par with OBGs like GN-z11, UHZ1, and GHZ9 at $z =$ 10.6, 10.1, and 10.2, respectively. Our simulation, the first to follow the coevolution of a DCBH and its host galaxy for several hundred Myr, shows that this ratio is a natural result of initial suppression of star formation by the DCBH and the later, violent blowout of metals by Pop III supernovae. Our models provide an excellent match to the spectra of UHZ1 and GHZ9 at $z =$ 10.1 and 10.4, respectively.

Figures (4)

• Figure 1: Panel (a): the DCBH at birth at $z =$ 25.7. Panel (b) the OBG near the end of the simulation at $z = 11.4$ centered on the black hole.
• Figure 2: Stellar masses (a), average halo metallicity (b) and SFRs (c) over cosmic time in Myr after the Big Bang.
• Figure 3: BH accretion rate (a), mass (b) and $M_{\rm BH}/M_{*}$ (c) over cosmic time in Myr after the Big Bang.
• Figure 4: Comparison of Cloudy spectra for the OBG to those for GHZ9, UHZ1 and GN-z11.