How Overmassive Black Holes Formed at Cosmic Dawn

Abstract Overmassive black hole galaxies (OBGs) at redshifts z ∼ 10, or 450 Myr after the Big Bang, are one of the most puzzling discoveries by the James Webb Space Telescope to date because they formed by such early epochs and their black-hole-to-stellar-mass ratios are 100 times higher than those in galaxies today. Here we show that OBGs are simply the result of DCBH birth in primordial halos at early times. A 70,000 M ⊙ DCBH forming at z = 25.7 in our cosmological simulation grows at about half the Eddington rate to 6.0 × 10 6 M ⊙ by z = 10.1. Its host galaxy reaches a stellar mass of 4 × 10 8 M ⊙ , a metallicity Z = 0.1 Z ⊙ , a star formation rate of 2 M ⊙ yr −1 , and M BH / M * ∼ 0.01, on par with OBGs like GN-z11, UHZ1, and GHZ9 at z = 10.6, 10.1, and 10.2, respectively. Our simulation, the first to follow the coevolution of a DCBH and its host galaxy for several hundred Myr while resolving star formation in the earliest minihalos, shows that this ratio is a natural result of initial suppression of star formation by the DCBH and the later, violent blowout of metals by Population III supernovae. Our models yield an excellent match to the spectra of UHZ1 and GHZ9 at z = 10.1 and 10.4, respectively.