Are Little Red Dots Powered by Highly Accreting Supermassive Balck Holes?

Little red dots (LRDs), high-redshift, red, and compact galaxies, are one of the most puzzling discoveries by JWST. The emission of these galaxies has been argued to be powered by accreting 10^7-10^8 Msun supermassive black holes (SMBHs). This claim has crucial consequences for our understanding of how the first black holes form and grow over cosmic time. A key feature of LRDs is their extreme X-ray weakness: analyses of individual and stacked sources have yielded non-detections or only tentative, inconclusive X-ray signals, except for a handful of individual cases. As the most natural explanation, i.e., high obscuration, seemed disfavored by JWST spectroscopic evidence, several authors have suggested that the X-ray weakness of LRDs is intrinsic, due to super-Eddington accretion rates.