JWST Little Red Dots Show Super-Eddington IMBHs Enshrouded by Dense Winds Analogous to η Carinae Eruption
Naidu and colleagues link JWST Little Red Dots to super-Eddington intermediate-mass black holes via direct parallels with η Carinae's Great Eruption and Type IIn supernovae. The model accounts for continua, lines, and lack of variability through dense wind envelopes and predicts these objects as the dust-forming precursors to massive black holes. Primary evidence is the self-consistent match of multiple LRD observables to wind physics rather than virialized AGN.
The paper proposes that LRD continua arise from radiation-driven winds launched by a buried central engine, creating an extended envelope where electron scattering and clumpy absorption produce the observed broad lines and P-Cygni profiles without requiring a classical virial broad-line region. This framework reinterprets reported overmassive black holes as artifacts of applying standard virial estimators to wind kinematics, instead favoring an escape-velocity argument that caps engine masses below 10^5 solar masses for typical LRD luminosities.
Context from stellar transients shows that η Carinae's Great Eruption and IIn events produce exactly the same combination of slow dense winds, shock-powered luminosity, and subsequent dust formation that is absent in standard AGN or star-forming galaxies. The absence of short-term variability and the low inferred surface gravity further exclude stellar photospheres while matching super-Eddington intermediate-mass black hole or supermassive star states.
Future ALMA and JWST spectroscopy targeting dust production and line profile evolution can test whether LRDs represent the obscured seed phase that evolves into classical AGN, a pathway overlooked in luminosity-function studies that treat LRDs as either starbursts or standard quasars.
Naidu et al.: JWST Cycle 3 spectroscopy of 20 LRDs will detect dust continuum rise within 6 months if the IIn-like envelope evolution holds, falsifying pure AGN torus models.
Sources (3)
- [1]Primary Source(https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.30711)
- [2]Supporting Source(https://arxiv.org/abs/2305.13344)
- [3]Supporting Source(https://ui.adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/2019MNRAS.482.2350S)