A Luminous Quasar at Redshift 7.642

By Feige Wang, Jinyi Yang, Xiaohui Fan, J. Hennawi, A. Barth, E. Bañados, F. Bian, K. Boutsia, T. Connor, F. Davies and 13 more. 2021

263 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Distant quasars are unique tracers to study the formation of the earliest supermassive black holes (SMBHs) and the history of cosmic reionization. Despite extensive efforts, only two quasars have been found at z ≥ 7.5, due to a combination of their low spatial density and the high contamination rate in quasar selection. We report the discovery of a luminous quasar at z = 7.642, J0313−1806, the most distant quasar yet known. This quasar has a bolometric luminosity of 3.6 × 1013 L ⊙. Deep spectroscopic observations reveal a SMBH with a mass of (1.6 ± 0.4) × 109 M ⊙ in this quasar. The existence of such a massive SMBH just ∼670 million years after the big bang challenges significantly theoretical models of SMBH growth. In addition, the quasar spectrum exhibits strong broad absorption line (BAL) features in C iv and Si iv, with a maximum velocity close to 20% of the speed of light. The relativistic BAL features, combined with a strongly blueshifted C iv emission line, indicate that there is a strong active galactic nucleus (AGN)-driven outflow in this system. Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array observations detect the dust continuum and [C ii] emission from the quasar host galaxy, yielding an accurate redshift of 7.6423 ± 0.0013 and suggesting that the quasar is hosted by an intensely star-forming galaxy, with a star formation rate of ∼200 M ⊙ yr−1 and a dust mass of ∼7 × 107 M ⊙. Follow-up observations of this reionization-era BAL quasar will provide a powerful probe of the effects of AGN feedback on the growth of the earliest massive galaxies.

Subfields: Astronomy and Astrophysics, Instrumentation

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/5eadb26d53c2737a092c066e2fa77ff72ccfabcc

Citations in the corpus

• The Rise of Faint, Red Active Galactic Nuclei at z > 4: A Sample of Little Red Dots in the JWST Extragalactic Legacy Fields (2025, unknown): “If the redshifts and AGN nature of these sources are con fi rmed, they would be among the most distant AGN ever discovered, with a redshift much higher than the highest-redshift AGN identi fi ed in the pre-JWST, which was found at z = 7.6 ( F. Wang et al. 2021 ) .”
• Evidence for heavy-seed origin of early supermassive black holes from a z ≈ 10 X-ray quasar (2023, unknown): “We also show the location of the three previously known highest-redshift quasars at z ≈ 7.5, which were identified in large-area optical surveys 48,50,51 .”
• A JWST/NIRSpec First Census of Broad-line AGNs at z = 4–7: Detection of 10 Faint AGNs with M BH ∼ 106–108 M ⊙ and Their Host Galaxy Properties (2023, unknown): “5 (Ba˜nados et al. 2018; Yang et al. 2020; Wang et al. 2021).”
• JWST CEERS and JADES Active Galaxies at z = 4–7 Violate the Local M •–M ⋆ Relation at >3σ: Implications for Low-mass Black Holes and Seeding Models (2023, unknown): “642 (Wang et al. 2021).”