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Born in the Dark: The Catastrophic Collapse of Fuzzy Dark Matter Solitons as the Origin of Little Red Dots

  • Authors: Tak-Pong Woo

Tak-Pong Woo 2026 The Astrophysical Journal 1002 .

  • Provider: AAS Journals

Caption: Figure 2.

Timescale hierarchy in soliton cores. Comparison between the dynamical time tdyn (blue solid line, ﹩{t}_{{\rm{dyn}}}\propto {M}_{s}^{-2}﹩) and the optically thin cooling time tcool (red dashed line; this corresponds strictly to the optically thin cooling time defined in Equation (5), not the effective diffusion-limited time trad) as a function of soliton mass Ms. The top axis explicitly provides the corresponding virial temperature Tvir to guide physical intuition. At low masses (Tvir < 104 K), the exponential suppression of atomic cooling in primordial gas leads to a stable regime where tcool > tdyn. As the soliton mass increases, the gas is heated above the atomic cooling threshold, causing a sharp drop in tcool. A critical mass emerges at Mcrit ≈ 2.8 × 107M, identified exactly at the intersection where the condition tcool = tdyn is satisfied; this threshold is obtained analytically by solving tcool = tdyn using the cooling function adopted in our model (see Appendix B). Above this mass threshold, the system enters the cooling-dominated regime (tcool < tdyn). For the massive regime relevant to LRDs (Ms ≳ 108M), the cooling time is orders of magnitude shorter than the dynamical time, inevitably triggering a catastrophic collapse.

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