The earliest supermassive black hole and quasar discovered in the universe

Almost every galaxy houses a monster in its middle – a supermassive black hole millions to billions times the size of the sun. Although much can still be learned about these objects, many scientists believe that they are crucial to the formation and structure of galaxies. What’s more, some of these black holes are particularly active and soar stars, dust and gas up to glowing growth disks that emit powerful radiation into the cosmos as it consumes dust around them. These quasars are some of the farthest objects astronomers can see, and there is now a new record for the farthest ever seen.

A team of scientists, led by former University of Santa Barbara doctoral student Feige Wang, including Professor Joe Hennawi and current postdoctoral fellow Riccardo Nanni, has announced the discovery of J0313-1806, the farthest quasar to date. has been discovered. Since it would have appeared more than 13 billion years ago, this fully formed distant quasar is also the earliest ever discovered, giving astronomers insight into the formation of massive galaxies in the early universe. The team’s findings were announced at the meeting of the American Astronomical Society in January 2021 and published in Astrophysical Journal Letters.

Quasars are the most energetic objects in the universe. It occurs when gas in the superheated growth disk around a supermassive black hole is relentlessly drawn inward and sheds energy across the electromagnetic spectrum. It releases enormous amounts of electromagnetic radiation, with the most massive examples easily protruding entire galaxies.

Quasar J0313-1806 lies 13 billion light-years away and existed only 690 million years after its existence Big explosion. It is powered by the earliest known supermassive black hole, which despite its early formation still weighs more than 1.6 billion times the mass of the sun. Indeed, J0313-1806 surpasses the modern Milky Way by a factor of 1000.

“The farthest quasars are crucial to understanding the origins of the earliest black holes and to understanding cosmic reunification – the last great phase transition of our universe,” he said. author Xiaohui Fan, a professor of astronomy at the University of Arizona, said.

The presence of such a massive black hole so early in the history of the universe challenges the theories of black hole formation. As lead author Wang, now a NASA Hubble Fellow at the University of Arizona, explains: ‘Black holes created by the very first massive stars could not have become so large within a few hundred million years. ”

The team first tracked down J0313-1806 after combing data from large aerial surveys. Of crucial importance for the characterization of the new quasar was a high-quality spectrum obtained from the WM Keck Observatory: ‘Through the University of California Observatory we have privileged access to the Keck telescopes on the crest of Mauna Kea, which enabled us to obtain high quality data on this object shortly after it was confirmed to be a quasar in other telescopes, ”said Hennawi.

In addition to weighing the monster-black hole, observations of the Keck Observatory have discovered an extraordinarily rapid outflow of the quasar in the form of a high-speed wind moving at 20% of the speed of light. “The energy released by such a high-velocity extreme outflow is large enough to affect star formation throughout the entire quasar host system,” said Jinyi Yang, Steward Observatory at the University of Arizona.

The early galaxy that the quasar presents undergoes a surge in star formation, producing new stars 200 times faster than the modern Milky Way. The system is the earliest known example of a quasar depicting the growth of its host system. The combination of this intense star formation, the light quasar and the rapid outflow makes J0313-1806 and its host system a promising natural laboratory to understand the growth of supermassive black holes and their host systems in the early universe.

“It would be an excellent target to investigate the formation of the earliest supermassive black holes,” Wang concluded. “We also hope to learn more about the effect of quasar outflow on their host system – as well as to learn how the most massive galaxies formed in the early universe.”

Finding these remote quasars requires incredibly meticulous work, because they are like needles in a haystack. Astronomers exploit digital images of billions of celestial objects to find promising brush candidates. ‘The current success rate for finding these objects is about 1%. You have to kiss a lot of frogs before you find your prince, ”Hennawi remarks.

Hennawi, Wang and Nanni are developing machine learning tools to analyze this big data and make the process of finding quasars in the distance more efficient. “In the coming year, the European Space Agency’s Euclid satellite and NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope will enable us to find perhaps a hundred quasars at this distance or further, ”Hennawi said. “With a large statistical sample of these objects, we will be able to draw up an exact timeline for the reionization period and shed more light on how these massive black holes formed.”

For more information on this study:

Reference: “A Luminous Quasar at Redshift 7.642” by Feige Wang, Jinyi Yang, Xiaohui Fan, Joseph F. Hennawi, Aaron J. Barth, Eduardo Banados, Fuyan Bian, Konstantina Boutsia, Thomas Connor, Frederick B. Davies, Roberto Decarli, Anna-Christina Eilers, Emanuele Paolo Farina, Richard Green, Linhua Jiang, Jiang-Tao Li, Chiara Mazzucchelli, Riccardo Nanni, Jan-Torge Schindler, Bram Venemans, Fabian Walter, Xue-Bing Wu and Minghao Yue, January 14, 2021, Astrophysical Magazine Letters.
DOI: 10.3847 / 2041-8213 / abd8c6