| Issue |
A&A
Volume 703, November 2025
|
|
|---|---|---|
| Article Number | A138 | |
| Number of page(s) | 10 | |
| Section | Cosmology (including clusters of galaxies) | |
| DOI | https://doi.org/10.1051/0004-6361/202555389 | |
| Published online | 13 November 2025 | |
The origin of the JWST supermassive black holes
1
Keemilise ja Bioloogilise Füüsika Instituut, Rävala pst. 10, 10143 Tallinn, Estonia
2
Department of Cybernetics, Tallinn University of Technology, Akadeemia tee 21, 12618 Tallinn, Estonia
3
King’s College London, Strand, London WC2R 2LS, United Kingdom
4
Theoretical Physics Department, CERN, Geneva, Switzerland
5
Dipartimento di Fisica e Astronomia, Università degli Studi di Padova, Via Marzolo 8, 35131 Padova, Italy
6
Istituto Nazionale di Fisica Nucleare, Sezione di Padova, Via Marzolo 8, 35131 Padova, Italy
⋆ Corresponding author: juan.urrutia@kbfi.ee
Received:
5
May
2025
Accepted:
6
August
2025
We present a new semi-analytical model for the evolution of galaxies and supermassive black holes (SMBHs) that is based on the extended Press-Schechter formalism and phenomenological modelling of star formation. The model yields black-hole-mass – stellar mass relations that reproduce both the JWST and pre-JWST observations. If the efficiency for BH mergers is high, the JWST data prefer light seeds, while the pre-JWST data prefer heavy seeds. The fit improves for a smaller merger efficiency, 𝒪(0.1), for which both data prefer heavy seeds, while also accommodating the pulsar-timing-array gravitational-wave background data.
Key words: cosmology: theory
© The Authors 2025
Open Access article, published by EDP Sciences, under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.
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