A CEERS Discovery of an Accreting Supermassive Black Hole 570 Myr after the Big Bang: Identifying a Progenitor of Massive z > 6 Quasars

By R. Larson, S. Finkelstein, D. Kocevski, T. Hutchison, J. Trump, P. Haro, Volker Bromm, N. Cleri, Mark Dickinson, S. Fujimoto and 41 more. Astrophysical Journal Letters, 2023

240 citations recorded by the source corpus.

We report the discovery of an accreting supermassive black hole at z = 8.679. This galaxy, denoted here as CEERS_1019, was previously discovered as a Lyα-break galaxy by Hubble with a Lyα redshift from Keck. As part of the Cosmic Evolution Early Release Science (CEERS) survey, we have observed this source with JWST/NIRSpec, MIRI, NIRCam, and NIRCam/WFSS and uncovered a plethora of emission lines. The Hβ line is best fit by a narrow plus a broad component, where the latter is measured at 2.5σ with an FWHM ∼1200 km s−1. We conclude this originates in the broadline region of an active galactic nucleus (AGN). This is supported by the presence of weak high-ionization lines (N V, N IV], and C III]), as well as a spatial point-source component. The implied mass of the black hole (BH) is log (M BH/M ⊙) = 6.95 ± 0.37, and we estimate that it is accreting at 1.2 ± 0.5 times the Eddington limit. The 1–8 μm photometric spectral energy distribution shows a continuum dominated by starlight and constrains the host galaxy to be massive (log M/M⊙ ∼9.5) and highly star-forming (star formation rate, or SFR ∼ 30 M⊙ yr−1; log sSFR ∼ − 7.9 yr−1). The line ratios show that the gas is metal-poor (Z/Z ⊙ ∼ 0.1), dense (n e ∼ 103 cm−3), and highly ionized (log U ∼ − 2.1). We use this present highest-redshift AGN discovery to place constraints on BH seeding models and find that a combination of either super-Eddington accretion from stellar seeds or Eddington accretion from very massive BH seeds is required to form this object.

Subfields: Astronomy and Astrophysics, Global and Planetary Change

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/67fd4bf58cadc738b2a19ab4b55d42394ede77ce

How researchers see this paper

The researchers whose trusted networks rank it highest, strongest advocate first. Every researcher gets a different order.

In Astronomy and Astrophysics

In Global and Planetary Change

Citations in the corpus

A Census of Photometrically Selected Little Red Dots at 4 < z < 9 in JWST Blank Fields (2024, background): “…Matthee et al. 2023; ¨Ubler et al. 2023) and even beyond the epoch of reionization, (e.g. Bogdan et al. 2023; Furtak et al. 2023c; Goulding et al. 2023; Koko-rev et al. 2023a; Larson et al. 2023; Lambrides et al. 2023; Maiolino et al. 2023a) only hundreds of millions of years after the Big Bang.”
The Complete CEERS Early Universe Galaxy Sample: A Surprisingly Slow Evolution of the Space Density of Bright Galaxies at z ∼ 8.5–14.5 (2023, methodology): “While one could model this contamination based on simulations, it relies on said simulations correctly modeling the colors of all potentially contaminating populations ( e.g., Harikane et al. 2023a; Larson et al. 2023a ) , which is unlikely, particularly prior to JWST observations.”
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): “…ﬁ rst year of JWST observations is the detection of numerous faint, broad-line active galactic nuclei ( AGN ) at z > 5 ( Y. Harikane et al. 2023; D. D. Kocevski et al. 2023; R. L. Larson et al. 2023; M. Onoue et al. 2023; J. E. Greene et al. 2024; R. Maiolino et al. 2024; J. Matthee et al. 2024 ) .”
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, background): “Very recently, Larson et al. (2023) have reported a broad H β emission line in a galaxy at z spec = 8 .”
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, methodology): “679, with a slightly heavier mass of ∼ 10 7 M ⊙ (Larson et al. 2023).”