SELF-REPLICATION COSMOLOGY: A "BLACK HOLES FIRST" SCENARIO AND THE ORIGIN OF THE FIRST GALAXIES

This paper considers a scenario for the formation of the first cosmic structures in which black holes arise before galaxies and serve as their seeds. Within the self-replication model a local overdensity of self-replicating dark particles forms a black hole without an initial singularity, around which a galaxy is subsequently assembled. The scenario is substantially revised relative to the previous version. First, the assumption that protons and light elements are synthesized in the accretion disk is withdrawn: the primordial deuterium abundance is reproduced only by a hot early Universe, whereas in stars and disks deuterium is destroyed rather than produced; baryonic matter and the light elements therefore arise in the standard way, through Big Bang nucleosynthesis. Second, a quantitative constraint that the model imposes on itself is obtained: since the mass growth index k(z) = −3w_eff(z) is small at high redshift, internal self-replication increases a black hole mass only by a factor of 1.2 between z = 20 and z = 6, and by about a factor of 10 from z = 10 to the present epoch. Early supermassive black holes must therefore be born already heavy — a conclusion consistent with the interpretation of the object UHZ1 as evidence for heavy seeds. A testable criterion and a falsification condition are formulated.