Little Red Dots on FIRE: The Ability of Bursty Galaxies to Host an Abundant Population of High-Redshift AGN
Andrew Marszewski, Claude-Andr\'e Faucher-Gigu\`ere, Guochao Sun, Daniel Angl\'es-Alc\'azar, Robert Feldmann, Kung-Yi Su, Tim B. Miller, Niranjan Chandra Roy

TL;DR
This study uses high-redshift galaxy simulations and accretion models to explain the abundance of observed faint active galactic nuclei, suggesting they are super Eddington accreting black holes in low-mass galaxies.
Contribution
It demonstrates that current models can account for the observed high-redshift AGN population and proposes a scenario involving super Eddington accretion in low-mass galaxies.
Findings
Models predict sufficient AGN abundance to match observations.
Overprediction of low-luminosity AGN suggests super Eddington accretion in small galaxies.
Mock observations replicate key properties of observed faint AGN.
Abstract
The James Webb Space Telescope has unveiled an abundant population of potential active galactic nuclei (AGN) at high redshift () known as little red dots (LRDs), which are likely hosted in relatively low-mass galaxies. However, previous theoretical models have highlighted the difficulty in continuously feeding massive black holes in the central regions of bursty, high-redshift galaxies because of repeated gas evacuation by stellar feedback. We analyze galaxies in high-redshift FIRE-2 simulations to understand whether they are capable of hosting the observed abundant population of high-redshift AGN. We use a gravitational torque-driven accretion (GTDA) model and a simple free-fall accretion model to derive black hole accretion rates and construct predicted AGN bolometric luminosity functions for . The GTDA model and the free-fall model with black holes accreting…
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