JWST's Little Red Dots as collapsed Supermassive Dark Stars

arXiv:2606.02539 · astro-ph.CO, gr-qc, hep-ph · Submitted 2026-06-01 · Read on arXiv

astro-ph.CO, gr-qc, hep-ph

Submitted: 2026-06-01

Updated: 2026-09-08

Comments: Version submitted for peer review at ApJ. In this update we made explicit that the connection between LRDs and Black Hole descendants of Supermassive Dark Stars was first hypothesized in Ilie et al., Universe 2026, 12, 1. This paper is an in depth analysis of that hypothesis

License: http://arxiv.org/licenses/nonexclusive-distrib/1.0/

Terminology

• Core — 10× in this paper · explained in 2 episodes
• Little Red Dots — 9× in this paper · explained in 2 episodes
• Metallicity — 3× in this paper · explained in 3 episodes
• AGN — 1× in this paper · explained in 1 episode
• Accuracy — 1× in this paper · explained in 1 episode
• Apparent Horizon — 1× in this paper · explained in 1 episode
• Fine-Tuning — 1× in this paper · explained in 5 episodes
• Trace — 1× in this paper · explained in 2 episodes

Sources

• Quasi-stars as a Means of Rapid Black Hole Growth in the Early Universe
• A remarkable Ruby: Absorption in dense gas, rather than evolved stars, drives the extreme Balmer break of a Little Red Dot at $z=3.5$
• Reconstructing PTA measurements via early seeding of supermassive black holes
• The Growth of the Central Black Holes in Quasi-stars
• Early Formation of Supermassive Black Holes via Dark Star Gravitational Instability
• The Rise of Faint, Red AGN at $z>4$: A Sample of Little Red Dots in the JWST Extragalactic Legacy Fields
• The Balmer Break and Optical Continuum of Little Red Dots from Super-Eddington Accretion
• A "Black Hole Star" Reveals the Remarkable Gas-Enshrouded Hearts of the Little Red Dots
• MEGA: Spectrophotometric SED Fitting of Little Red Dots Detected in JWST MIRI
• Evolutionary Tracks and Spectral Properties of Quasi-stars and Their Correlation with Little Red Dots
• Little Red Dots at an Inflection Point: Ubiquitous "V-Shaped" Turnover Consistently Occurs at the Balmer Limit
• Episodic super-Eddington accretion as a clue to Overmassive Black Holes in the early Universe
• RUBIES: JWST/NIRSpec Confirmation of an Infrared-luminous, Broad-line Little Red Dot with an Ionized Outflow

Related papers

• Angular clustering and bias of photometric quasars in the Kilo-Degree Survey Data Release 4
• A Novel kinetic Sunyaev-Zel'dovich Estimator for Electron-Electron Correlations
• Magnetic fields at the dawn of structure formation I. The CARLA J1510+5958 proto-cluster
• Dark Energy Survey Year 6 Results: Weak Lensing and Galaxy Clustering Cosmological Analysis Framework
• Exploring the Impact of Systematic Bias in Type Ia Supernova Cosmology Across Diverse Dark Energy Parametrizations
• Non-Gaussian Galaxy Stochasticity and the Noise-Field Formulation