A "Black Hole Star" Reveals the Remarkable Gas-Enshrouded Hearts of the Little Red Dots
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arXiv
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2025
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| author | Naidu, Rohan P. Matthee, Jorryt Katz, Harley de Graaff, Anna Oesch, Pascal Smith, Aaron Greene, Jenny E. Brammer, Gabriel Weibel, Andrea Hviding, Raphael Chisholm, John Labbé, Ivo Simcoe, Robert A. Witten, Callum Atek, Hakim Baggen, Josephine F. W. Belli, Sirio Bezanson, Rachel Boogaard, Leindert A. Bose, Sownak Covelo-Paz, Alba Dayal, Pratika Fudamoto, Yoshinobu Furtak, Lukas J. Giovinazzo, Emma Goulding, Andy Gronke, Max Heintz, Kasper E. Hirschmann, Michaela Illingworth, Garth Inoue, Akio K. Johnson, Benjamin D. Leja, Joel Leonova, Ecaterina McConachie, Ian Maseda, Michael V. Natarajan, Priyamvada Nelson, Erica Setton, David J. Shivaei, Irene Sobral, David Stefanon, Mauro Tacchella, Sandro Toft, Sune Torralba, Alberto van Dokkum, Pieter van der Wel, Arjen Volonteri, Marta Walter, Fabian Wang, Bingjie Watson, Darach |
| author_facet | Naidu, Rohan P. Matthee, Jorryt Katz, Harley de Graaff, Anna Oesch, Pascal Smith, Aaron Greene, Jenny E. Brammer, Gabriel Weibel, Andrea Hviding, Raphael Chisholm, John Labbé, Ivo Simcoe, Robert A. Witten, Callum Atek, Hakim Baggen, Josephine F. W. Belli, Sirio Bezanson, Rachel Boogaard, Leindert A. Bose, Sownak Covelo-Paz, Alba Dayal, Pratika Fudamoto, Yoshinobu Furtak, Lukas J. Giovinazzo, Emma Goulding, Andy Gronke, Max Heintz, Kasper E. Hirschmann, Michaela Illingworth, Garth Inoue, Akio K. Johnson, Benjamin D. Leja, Joel Leonova, Ecaterina McConachie, Ian Maseda, Michael V. Natarajan, Priyamvada Nelson, Erica Setton, David J. Shivaei, Irene Sobral, David Stefanon, Mauro Tacchella, Sandro Toft, Sune Torralba, Alberto van Dokkum, Pieter van der Wel, Arjen Volonteri, Marta Walter, Fabian Wang, Bingjie Watson, Darach |
| contents | The physical processes that led to the formation of billion solar mass black holes within the first 700 million years of cosmic time remain a puzzle. Several theoretical scenarios have been proposed to seed and rapidly grow black holes, but direct observations of these mechanisms remain elusive. Here we present a source 660 million years after the Big Bang that displays singular properties: among the largest Hydrogen Balmer breaks reported at any redshift, broad multi-peaked H$β$ emission, and Balmer line absorption in multiple transitions. We model this source as a "black hole star" (BH*) where the Balmer break and absorption features are a result of extremely dense, turbulent gas forming a dust-free "atmosphere" around a supermassive black hole. This source may provide evidence of an early black hole embedded in dense gas -- a theoretical configuration proposed to rapidly grow black holes via super-Eddington accretion. Radiation from the BH* appears to dominate almost all observed light, leaving limited room for contribution from its host galaxy. We demonstrate that the recently discovered "Little Red Dots" (LRDs) with perplexing spectral energy distributions can be explained as BH*s embedded in relatively brighter host galaxies. This source provides evidence that black hole masses in the LRDs may be over-estimated by orders of magnitude -- the BH* is effectively dust-free contrary to the steep dust corrections applied while modeling LRDs, and the physics that gives rise to the complex line shapes and luminosities may deviate from assumptions underlying standard scaling relations. |
| format | Preprint |
| id |
arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2503_16596 |
| institution | arXiv |
| publishDate | 2025 |
| record_format | arxiv |
| spellingShingle | A "Black Hole Star" Reveals the Remarkable Gas-Enshrouded Hearts of the Little Red Dots Naidu, Rohan P. Matthee, Jorryt Katz, Harley de Graaff, Anna Oesch, Pascal Smith, Aaron Greene, Jenny E. Brammer, Gabriel Weibel, Andrea Hviding, Raphael Chisholm, John Labbé, Ivo Simcoe, Robert A. Witten, Callum Atek, Hakim Baggen, Josephine F. W. Belli, Sirio Bezanson, Rachel Boogaard, Leindert A. Bose, Sownak Covelo-Paz, Alba Dayal, Pratika Fudamoto, Yoshinobu Furtak, Lukas J. Giovinazzo, Emma Goulding, Andy Gronke, Max Heintz, Kasper E. Hirschmann, Michaela Illingworth, Garth Inoue, Akio K. Johnson, Benjamin D. Leja, Joel Leonova, Ecaterina McConachie, Ian Maseda, Michael V. Natarajan, Priyamvada Nelson, Erica Setton, David J. Shivaei, Irene Sobral, David Stefanon, Mauro Tacchella, Sandro Toft, Sune Torralba, Alberto van Dokkum, Pieter van der Wel, Arjen Volonteri, Marta Walter, Fabian Wang, Bingjie Watson, Darach Astrophysics of Galaxies Cosmology and Nongalactic Astrophysics High Energy Astrophysical Phenomena Solar and Stellar Astrophysics The physical processes that led to the formation of billion solar mass black holes within the first 700 million years of cosmic time remain a puzzle. Several theoretical scenarios have been proposed to seed and rapidly grow black holes, but direct observations of these mechanisms remain elusive. Here we present a source 660 million years after the Big Bang that displays singular properties: among the largest Hydrogen Balmer breaks reported at any redshift, broad multi-peaked H$β$ emission, and Balmer line absorption in multiple transitions. We model this source as a "black hole star" (BH*) where the Balmer break and absorption features are a result of extremely dense, turbulent gas forming a dust-free "atmosphere" around a supermassive black hole. This source may provide evidence of an early black hole embedded in dense gas -- a theoretical configuration proposed to rapidly grow black holes via super-Eddington accretion. Radiation from the BH* appears to dominate almost all observed light, leaving limited room for contribution from its host galaxy. We demonstrate that the recently discovered "Little Red Dots" (LRDs) with perplexing spectral energy distributions can be explained as BH*s embedded in relatively brighter host galaxies. This source provides evidence that black hole masses in the LRDs may be over-estimated by orders of magnitude -- the BH* is effectively dust-free contrary to the steep dust corrections applied while modeling LRDs, and the physics that gives rise to the complex line shapes and luminosities may deviate from assumptions underlying standard scaling relations. |
| title | A "Black Hole Star" Reveals the Remarkable Gas-Enshrouded Hearts of the Little Red Dots |
| topic | Astrophysics of Galaxies Cosmology and Nongalactic Astrophysics High Energy Astrophysical Phenomena Solar and Stellar Astrophysics |
| url | https://arxiv.org/abs/2503.16596 |