Rapidly growing primordial black holes as seeds of the massive high-redshift JWST Galaxies

Abstract

A group of massive galaxies at redshifts of $z\gtrsim 7$ have been recently detected by the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST), which were unexpected to form so early within the framework of standard Big Bang cosmology. In this work, we propose that this puzzle can be explained by the presence of some primordial black holes (PBHs) with a mass of $\sim 1000 M_\odot$. These PBHs, clothed in dark matter halo and undergoing super-Eddington accretion, serve as seeds for the early galaxy formation with masses of $\sim 10^{8}-10^{10}~M_\odot$ at high redshift, thus accounting for the JWST observations. Using a hierarchical Bayesian inference framework to constrain the PBH mass distribution models, we find that the Lognormal model with $M_{\rm c}\sim 750M_\odot$ is preferred over other hypotheses. These rapidly growing BHs are expected to emit strong radiation and may appear as high-redshift compact objects, similar to those recently discovered by JWST. Although we focuse on PBHs in this work, the bound on the initial mass of the seed black holes remains robust even if they were formed through astrophysical channels.