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Primordial-Black-Hole-Based Pathways to Little Red Dots

Valerio De Luca1,*, Loris Del Grosso1,†, Gabriele Franciolini2,3,4,‡, Konstantinos Kritos1,§, Emanuele Berti1,∥, Daniel J. D’Orazio5,1,6,¶, and Joseph Silk1,7,8,**

  • *Contact author: vdeluca2@jh.edu
  • †Contact author: ldelgro1@jh.edu
  • ‡Contact author: gabriele.franciolini@unipd.it
  • §Contact author: kkritos1@jhu.edu
  • ∥Contact author: berti@jhu.edu
  • Contact author: dorazio@stsci.edu
  • **Contact author: silk@iap.fr
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Phys. Rev. Lett. 136, 231402 – Published 12 June, 2026

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1103/6y1w-87pd

Abstract

The James Webb Space Telescope has uncovered a population of compact, high-redshift sources, the Little Red Dots (LRDs), which may host supermassive black holes (BHs) significantly heavier than their stellar content compared with local scaling relations. These objects challenge standard models of early galaxy formation and may represent an extreme class of early BH hosts. In this Letter, we investigate whether these BHs could have a primordial origin. We first show that the direct formation of these BH masses in the early Universe is excluded by stringent cosmic microwave background μ-distortion limits. We then investigate the assembly of massive BHs from lighter, observationally allowed primordial black holes (PBHs) via hierarchical mergers, finding that, although this channel can operate depending on the merger history, it faces challenges in explaining the observations due to the rarity of the required high-redshift dark matter halos. Finally, we estimate gas accretion onto intermediate-mass PBHs, while jointly tracking metallicity evolution, and identify regions of parameter space in which such growth could reproduce the observed properties of LRDs. As a special case, we focus on the strongly lensed source QSO1, whose extremely low metallicity and large mass provide a stringent test of these formation channels.

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Phys. Rev. Lett. 136, 231402– Published 12 June, 2026
  • Received 8 January 2026
  • Revised 3 April 2026
  • Accepted 22 April 2026
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