The first phase of stellar evolution in the history of the Universe may be Dark Stars, powered by dark matter heating rather than by nuclear fusion. Weakly Interacting Massive Particles, which may be their own antipartners, collect inside the first stars and annihilate to produce a heat source that can power the stars for millions to billions of years. In this paper we show that these objects can grow to be supermassive dark stars (SMDS) with masses $\gtrsim (10^5-10^7) \msun$. The growth continues as long as dark matter heating persists, since dark stars are large and cool (surface temperature $\lesssim 5\times 10^4$K) and do not emit enough ionizing photons to prevent further accretion of baryons onto the star. The dark matter may be provided by two mechanisms: (1) gravitational attraction of dark matter particles on a variety of orbits not previously considered, and (2) capture of WIMPs due to elastic scattering. Once the dark matter fuel is exhausted, the SMDS becomes a heavy main sequence star; these stars eventually collapse to form massive black holes that may provide seeds for supermassive black holes in the Universe. SMDS are very bright, with luminosities exceeding $(10^9-10^{11}) L_\odot$. We demonstrate that for several reasonable parameters, these objects will be detectable with JWST. Such an observational discovery would confirm the existence of a new phase of stellar evolution powered by dark matter.
Direct-collapse black holes (DCBHs) may be the seeds of the first quasars, over 200 of which have now been detected at $z > 6$ . The James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) could detect DCBHs in the near infrared (NIR) at $z \lesssim 20$ and probe the evolution of primordial quasars at their earliest stages, but only in narrow fields that may not capture many of them. Wide-field NIR surveys by Euclid and the Nancy Grace Roman Survey Telescope (RST) would enclose far greater numbers of DCBHs but only directly detect them at $z \lesssim 6 - 8$ because of their lower sensitivities. However, their large…
JWST Reveals a Candidate Supermassive Black Hole Binary at z=4.3 in the Brightest Sub-millimeter Galaxy in COSMOS-Web
The University of Texas at Austin（德克萨斯大学奥斯汀分校）；University of California Santa Barbara（加州大学圣塔芭芭拉分校）；University of Colorado, Boulder（科罗拉多大学博尔德分校）；NASA-Goddard Space Flight Center（美国宇航局戈达德太空飞行中心）
Constraints on Dark Matter Models from Supermassive Black Hole Evolution
King’s College London（伦敦国王学院）；Theoretical Physics Department, CERN（欧洲核子研究中心理论物理部）；Keemilise ja Bioloogilise Füüsika Instituut（塔尔图大学化学与生物物理研究所）；Department of Cybernetics, Tallinn University of Technology（塔林科技大学网络学系）；Dipartimento di Fisica e Astronomia, Università degli Studi di Padova（帕多瓦大学物理与天文系）；Istituto Nazionale di Fisica Nucleare, Sezione di Padova（意大利国家核物理研究所帕多瓦分部）
JWST Confirmation of a Runaway Supermassive Black Hole via its Supersonic Bow Shock
Yale University（耶鲁大学）；Dragonfly Focused Research Organization（龙卷风重点研究机构）；Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics（哈佛-史密森尼天体物理中心）；University of California, Santa Barbara（加州大学圣塔芭芭拉分校）；University of Toronto（多伦多大学）；Tel Aviv University（特拉维夫大学）；San José State University（圣何塞州立大学）；University of California Santa Cruz（加州大学圣克鲁兹分校）
This study explores the gravitational lensing effects of supermassive black holes (SMBHs) in galaxy clusters. While the presence of central SMBHs in galaxies is firmly established, recent work from high-resolution simulations predict the existence of an additional population of wandering SMBHs. Though the masses of these SMBHs are a minor perturbation on the larger scale and individual galaxy scale dark matter components in the cluster, they can impact statistical lensing properties and individual lensed image configurations. Probing for these potentially observable signatures, we find that SM…
The emergence of the first black holes during the first billion years of cosmic history marks a key event in cosmology. Their formation is part of the overall process of ending the cosmic dark ages, when the first stars appeared in low-mass dark matter haloes about a few 100 million years after the Big Bang. The first stars, galaxies, and black holes transformed the Universe from its simple initial state into one of ever increasing complexity. We review recent progress on our emerging theoretical picture of how the first black holes appeared on the cosmic scene, and how they impacted the subse…
The collapse of supermassive primordial stars in hot, atomically-cooled halos may have given birth to the first quasars at $z \sim$ 15 - 20. Recent numerical simulations of these rapidly accreting stars reveal that they are cool, red hypergiants shrouded by dense envelopes of pristine atomically-cooled gas at 6,000 - 8,000 K, with luminosities $L$ $\gtrsim$ 10$^{10}$ L$_{\odot}$. Could such luminous but cool objects be detected as the first stage of quasar formation in future near infrared (NIR) surveys? We have now calculated the spectra of supermassive primordial stars in their birth envelop…
Observed supermassive black holes in the early universe have several proposed formation channels, in part because most of these channels are difficult to probe. One of the more promising channels, the direct collapse of a supermassive star, has several possible probes including the explosion of a helium-core supermassive star triggered by a general relativistic instability. We develop a straightforward method for evaluating the general relativistic radial instability without simplifying assumptions and apply it to population III supermassive stars taken from a post Newtonian stellar evolution …
The most distant known quasar recently discovered by Bañados et al. (2018) is at $z=7.5$ (690 Myr after the Big Bang), at the dawn of galaxy formation. We explore the host galaxy of the brightest quasar in the large volume cosmological hydrodynamic simulation BlueTides, which in Phase II has reached these redshifts. The brightest quasar in BlueTides has a luminosity of a $\sim$ few $10^{13} L_{\odot}$ and a black hole mass of $6.4 \times 10^{8} M_{\odot}$ at $z \sim 7.5$, comparable to the observed quasar (the only one in this large volume). The quasar resides in a rare halo of mass $M_{H} \si…
Extremely red quasars, with bolometric luminosities exceeding $10^{47}$ erg s$^{-1}$, are a fascinating high-redshift population that is absent in the local universe. They are the best candidates for supermassive black holes accreting at rates at or above the Eddington limit, and they are associated with the most rapid and powerful outflows of ionized gas known to date. They are also hosted by massive galaxies. Here we present the first integral field unit (IFU) observations of a high-redshift quasar obtained by the Near Infrared Spectrograph (NIRSpec) on board the James Webb Space Telescope (…
In the local universe, black hole masses have been inferred from the observed increase in the velocities of stars at the centres of their host galaxies. So far, masses of supermassive black holes in the early universe have only been inferred indirectly, using relationships calibrated to their locally observed counterparts. Here, we use the latest observational constraints on the evolution of stellar masses in galaxies to predict, for the first time, that the region of influence of a central supermassive black hole at the epochs where the first galaxies were formed is $\mathit{directly \ resolv…
