Early Formation of Supermassive Black Holes via Dark Star Gravitational Instability

TL;DR

This paper proposes a new mechanism where dark matter-powered stars in the early universe grow to supermassive sizes and collapse into black holes, potentially explaining the origin of the earliest supermassive black holes.

Contribution

It introduces a dark star growth model that leads to supermassive black holes, bypassing standard stellar evolution pathways and showing robustness across various initial conditions.

Findings

Dark stars can reach 10^4 to 10^7 solar masses before collapsing.

The process is insensitive to initial dark star mass and formation epoch.

Resulting SMBHs can seed the supermassive black holes observed at high redshift.

Abstract

We show that dark stars, which are dark-matter-powered stars in the early universe, can grow by accretion to masses in the range $\mathscr{O}\left ({10}^4\right )-\mathscr{O}\left ({10}^7\right)\,{M_\odot}$ before the general-relativistic Feynman-Chandrasekhar instability causes their dynamical collapse to black holes. These accreting dark star configurations avoid standard stellar nuclear- and weak-interaction evolution that would lead to their demise long before they reached this supermassive size. Remarkably, this mechanism for supermassive black hole (SMBH) genesis is relatively robust to initial dark star mass, formation epoch, accretion rate and its history. The SMBHs produced this way can serve as seeds for even larger SMBHs $({\gtrsim}10^9\,M_\odot)$ that have been discovered at high redshift.