An international team of astronomers discovered the second most distant quasar ever found. Named Pōniuā`ena and designated J100758.264 + 211529.207 (J1007 + 2115), the object is about 13.1 billion light-years away, and contains a massive black hole with a mass equivalent to approximately 1.5 billion suns, approximately twice as massive as that in the most distant quasar known ULAS J134208.10 + 092838.61. The existence of a massive black hole just 700 million years after the Big Bang significantly challenges models of the growth of the first supermassive black holes.
Artist’s impression of the quasar Pōniuā`ena. Image credit: International Gemini Observatory / NOIRLab / NSF / AURA / P. Marenfeld.
“Pōniuā`ena is the most distant known object in the Universe that houses a black hole of more than a billion solar masses,” said Dr. Jinyi Yang, a postdoctoral researcher at the Steward Observatory at the University of Arizona.
“For a black hole of this size to form so early in the Universe, it would need to start as a solar mass ‘seed’ black hole of approximately 100 million years after the Big Bang, rather than grow from a much smaller black hole formed by the collapse of a single star. “
Current theory suggests that at the beginning of the Universe after the Big Bang, atoms were too distant from each other to interact and form stars and galaxies.
The birth of stars and galaxies, as we know them, occurred during the Age of Reionization, which began about 400 hundred million years after the Big Bang.
The discovery of quasars like Pōniuāʻena, deep in the Age of Reionization, is a great step towards understanding this reionization process and the formation of the first supermassive black holes and massive galaxies.
“How can the Universe produce such a massive black hole so early in its history?” said Professor Xiaohui Fan, an astronomer at the University of Arizona.
“This discovery presents the greatest challenge to the theory of black hole formation and growth in the early Universe.”
“Pōniuā`ena acts as a cosmic beacon,” said Professor Joseph Hennawi, an astronomer at the University of California at Santa Barbara.
“As its light travels the long journey to Earth, its spectrum is altered by diffuse gas in the intergalactic medium that allowed us to determine when the Age of Reionization occurred.”
The discovery is reported in the Astrophysical charts.
_____
Jinyi Yang et al. 2020. Pōniuā`ena: A Luminous z = 7.5 Quasar Hosting a 1.5 Billion Solar Mass Black Hole. ApJL, in press; arXiv: 2006.13452
