Unveiling the First Black Holes With JWST:Multi-wavelength Spectral Predictions

Abstract

Growing supermassive black holes ( ) that power luminous quasars from light seeds—the remnants of the first stars—within a Gyr of the Big Bang poses a timing challenge. The formation of massive black hole seeds via direct collapse with initial masses alleviates this problem. Viable direct-collapse black hole formation sites, the satellite halos of star-forming galaxies, merge and acquire stars to produce a new, transient class of high-redshift objects, obese black hole galaxies (OBGs). The accretion luminosity outshines that of the stars in OBGs. We predict the multi-wavelength energy output of OBGs and growing Pop III remnants at z  = 9 for standard and slim disk accretion, as well as high and low metallicities of the associated stellar population. We derive robust selection criteria for OBGs—a pre-selection to eliminate blue sources, followed by color–color cuts and the ratio of X-ray flux to rest-frame optical flux . Our cuts sift out OBGs from other bright, high- and low-redshift contaminants in the infrared. OBGs with predicted are unambiguously detectable by the Mid-Infrared Instrument (MIRI), on the upcoming James Webb Space Telescope ( JWST ). For parameters explored here, growing Pop III remnants with predicted will likely be undetectable by JWST . We demonstrate that JWST has the power to discriminate between initial seeding mechanisms.