TY - JOUR
T1 - A luminous quasar at redshift 7.642
AU - Wang, Feige
AU - Yang, Jinyi
AU - Fan, Xiaohui
AU - Hennawi, Joseph F.
AU - Barth, Aaron J.
AU - Banados, Eduardo
AU - Bian, Fuyan
AU - Boutsia, Konstantina
AU - Connor, Thomas
AU - Davies, Frederick B.
AU - Decarli, Roberto
AU - Eilers, Anna Christina
AU - Farina, Emanuele Paolo
AU - Green, Richard
AU - Jiang, Linhua
AU - Li, Jiang Tao
AU - Mazzucchelli, Chiara
AU - Nanni, Riccardo
AU - Schindler, Jan Torge
AU - Venemans, Bram
AU - Walter, Fabian
AU - Wu, Xue Bing
AU - Yue, Minghao
N1 - Funding Information:
Support for this work was provided by NASA through the NASA Hubble Fellowship grant #HST-HF2-51448.001-A awarded by the Space Telescope Science Institute, which is operated by the Association of Universities for Research in Astronomy, Incorporated, under NASA contract NAS5-26555. J.Y., X.F., and M.Y. acknowledge the support from the US NSF grant AST 15-15115, AST 19-08284, and NASA ADAP grant NNX17AF28G. Research by A.J.B. is supported by NSF grant AST-1907290. The work of T.C. was carried out at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, California Institute of Technology, under a contract with NASA. ACE acknowledges support by NASA through the NASA Hubble Fellowship grant #HF2-51434 awarded by the Space Telescope Science Institute, which is operated by the Association of Universities for Research in Astronomy, Inc., for NASA, under contract NAS5-26555. L.J. acknowledge support from the National Science Foundation of China (11721303, 11890693) and the National Key R&D Program of China (2016YFA0400703). B.P.V. acknowledges funding through the ERC Advanced Grant 740246 (Cosmic Gas). X.W. is thankful for the support from the National Key R&D Program of China (2016YFA0400703) and the National Science Foundation of China (11533001 & 11721303).
Funding Information:
This research is based in part on observations obtained at the international Gemini Observatory (GS-2019B-Q-134, GN-2019B-DD-110), a program of NSFs NOIRLab, which is managed by the Association of Universities for Research in Astronomy (AURA) under a cooperative agreement with the National Science Foundation. on behalf of the Gemini Observatory partnership: the National Science Foundation (United States), National Research Council (Canada), Agencia Nacional de Investigación y Desarrollo (Chile), Ministerio de Ciencia, Tecnología e Innovación (Argentina), Ministério da Ciência, Tecnologia, Inovações e Comunicações (Brazil), and Korea Astronomy and Space Science Institute (Republic of Korea).
Funding Information:
Some of the data presented in this Letter were obtained at the W. M. Keck Observatory, which is operated as a scientific partnership among the California Institute of Technology, the University of California, and the National Aeronautics and Space Administration. The Observatory was made possible by the generous financial support of the W. M. Keck Foundation. The authors wish to recognize and acknowledge the very significant cultural role and reverence that the summit of Maunakea has always had within the indigenous Hawaiian community.
Publisher Copyright:
© 2021. The American Astronomical Society.
PY - 2021/1/20
Y1 - 2021/1/20
N2 - 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 × 1013Le. Deep spectroscopic observations reveal a SMBH with a mass of (1.6 ± 0.4) × 109M⊙ 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 ∼200M⊙ yr-1 and a dust mass of ∼7 × 107M⊙. Follow-up observations of this reionizationera BAL quasar will provide a powerful probe of the effects of AGN feedback on the growth of the earliest massive galaxies.
AB - 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 × 1013Le. Deep spectroscopic observations reveal a SMBH with a mass of (1.6 ± 0.4) × 109M⊙ 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 ∼200M⊙ yr-1 and a dust mass of ∼7 × 107M⊙. Follow-up observations of this reionizationera BAL quasar will provide a powerful probe of the effects of AGN feedback on the growth of the earliest massive galaxies.
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U2 - 10.3847/2041-8213/abd8c6
DO - 10.3847/2041-8213/abd8c6
M3 - Article
AN - SCOPUS:85100138244
SN - 2041-8205
VL - 907
JO - Astrophysical Journal Letters
JF - Astrophysical Journal Letters
IS - 1
M1 - abd8c6
ER -