Abstract
A group of massive galaxies at redshifts of z ≳ 7 have been recently detected by the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST), which were unexpected to form at such an early time within the standard Big Bang cosmology. In this work, we propose that this puzzle can be explained by the presence of some primordial black holes (PBHs) with a mass of ∼ 1000M⊙. These PBHs act as seeds for early galaxy formation with masses of ∼ 108–1010M⊙ at high redshift, hence accounting for the JWST observations. We use a hierarchical Bayesian inference framework to constrain the PBH mass distribution models, and find that the Lognormal model with the Mc ∼ 750M⊙ is preferred over other hypotheses. These rapidly growing BHs are expected to have strong radiation and may appear as high-redshift compact objects, similar to those recently discovered by JWST. Although we focused on PBHs in this work, the bound on the initial mass of the seed black holes remains robust even if they were formed through astrophysical channels.
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We are grateful to Lei Feng, Yu-Yang Songsheng, Jian-Min Wang, Qiang Yuan, and Lei Zu for their helpful discussion. This work is supported in part by the National Key R&D Program of China (Grant No. 2021YFC2203100), the National Natural Science Foundation of China (Grant Nos. 11921003, 11961131007, 11653002, 12003029, 12261131497, and 12003074), China Postdoctoral Science Foundation (Grant No. 2023TQ0355), CAS Young Interdisciplinary Innovation Team (Grant No. JCTD-2022-20), 111 Project for “Observational and Theoretical Research on Dark Matter and Dark Energy” (Grant No. B23042), the Fundamental Research Funds for Central Universities, the CSC Innovation Talent Funds, the CAS Project for Young Scientists in Basic Research (Grant No. YSBR-006), and by the USTC Research Funds of the Double First-Class Initiative.
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Yuan, GW., Lei, L., Wang, YZ. et al. Rapidly growing primordial black holes as seeds of the massive high-redshift JWST Galaxies. Sci. China Phys. Mech. Astron. 67, 109512 (2024). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11433-024-2433-3
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11433-024-2433-3