TY - JOUR
T1 - A Unified Dark-matter-driven Relativistic Bondi Route to Black Hole Growth from Stellar to Supermassive Scales
AU - Chen, Chian Shu
AU - Lin, Feng Li
N1 - Publisher Copyright:
© 2026. The Author(s). Published by the American Astronomical Society. Original content from this work may be used under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 licence. Any further distribution of this work must maintain attribution to the author(s) and the title of the work, journal citation and DOI.
PY - 2026/4/20
Y1 - 2026/4/20
N2 - Observations of luminous quasars at z ≳ 7 reveal supermassive black holes (SMBHs) with inferred masses MBH ∼ 109 M⊙ formed within the first ∼700 Myr of cosmic history. Standard growth channels—Eddington-limited gas accretion and hierarchical mergers—face severe timescale restrictions. We consider a super-Eddington accretion mechanism aided by the Bondi accretion of a minimal model of self-interacting dark matter (SIDM). We demonstrate that in a critical regime with a near-relativistic sound speed, Bondi accretion yields an accretion rate that depends only on the SIDM mass m, thus it is universal across the ambient environment. This critical accretion mechanism for m ≳ 10−2 eV can grow seeds as small as 10 M⊙ primordial black holes (PBHs) in the early Universe into 109–1010 M⊙ SMBHs by z ∼ 7 without fine-tuned environments. Therefore, given a mass distribution of PBHs and a value of m, the mass function of primary black holes at late time can be fully determined with masses ranging from stellar to SMBHs. This connects the microscopic physics of dark matter to astrophysical observations of black holes.
AB - Observations of luminous quasars at z ≳ 7 reveal supermassive black holes (SMBHs) with inferred masses MBH ∼ 109 M⊙ formed within the first ∼700 Myr of cosmic history. Standard growth channels—Eddington-limited gas accretion and hierarchical mergers—face severe timescale restrictions. We consider a super-Eddington accretion mechanism aided by the Bondi accretion of a minimal model of self-interacting dark matter (SIDM). We demonstrate that in a critical regime with a near-relativistic sound speed, Bondi accretion yields an accretion rate that depends only on the SIDM mass m, thus it is universal across the ambient environment. This critical accretion mechanism for m ≳ 10−2 eV can grow seeds as small as 10 M⊙ primordial black holes (PBHs) in the early Universe into 109–1010 M⊙ SMBHs by z ∼ 7 without fine-tuned environments. Therefore, given a mass distribution of PBHs and a value of m, the mass function of primary black holes at late time can be fully determined with masses ranging from stellar to SMBHs. This connects the microscopic physics of dark matter to astrophysical observations of black holes.
KW - Bondi accretion (174)
KW - Cosmology (343)
KW - Dark matter (353)
KW - High energy astrophysics (739)
KW - James Webb Space Telescope (2291)
KW - Supermassive black holes (1663)
UR - https://www.scopus.com/pages/publications/105037476628
UR - https://www.scopus.com/pages/publications/105037476628#tab=citedBy
U2 - 10.3847/2041-8213/ae5954
DO - 10.3847/2041-8213/ae5954
M3 - Article
AN - SCOPUS:105037476628
SN - 2041-8205
VL - 1001
JO - Astrophysical Journal Letters
JF - Astrophysical Journal Letters
IS - 2
ER -