TY - JOUR
T1 - A CEERS Discovery of an Accreting Supermassive Black Hole 570 Myr after the Big Bang
T2 - Identifying a Progenitor of Massive z > 6 Quasars
AU - The CEERS Team
AU - Larson, Rebecca L.
AU - Finkelstein, Steven L.
AU - Kocevski, Dale D.
AU - Hutchison, Taylor A.
AU - Trump, Jonathan R.
AU - Haro, Pablo Arrabal
AU - Bromm, Volker
AU - Cleri, Nikko J.
AU - Dickinson, Mark
AU - Fujimoto, Seiji
AU - Kartaltepe, Jeyhan S.
AU - Koekemoer, Anton M.
AU - Papovich, Casey
AU - Pirzkal, Nor
AU - Tacchella, Sandro
AU - Zavala, Jorge A.
AU - Bagley, Micaela
AU - Behroozi, Peter
AU - Champagne, Jaclyn B.
AU - Cole, Justin W.
AU - Jung, Intae
AU - Morales, Alexa M.
AU - Yang, Guang
AU - Zhang, Haowen
AU - Zitrin, Adi
AU - Amorín, Ricardo O.
AU - Burgarella, Denis
AU - Casey, Caitlin M.
AU - Chávez Ortiz, Óscar A.
AU - Cox, Isabella G.
AU - Chworowsky, Katherine
AU - Fontana, Adriano
AU - Gawiser, Eric
AU - Grazian, Andrea
AU - Grogin, Norman A.
AU - Harish, Santosh
AU - Hathi, Nimish P.
AU - Hirschmann, Michaela
AU - Holwerda, Benne W.
AU - Juneau, Stéphanie
AU - Leung, Gene C.K.
AU - Lucas, Ray A.
AU - McGrath, Elizabeth J.
AU - Pérez-González, Pablo G.
AU - Rigby, Jane R.
AU - Seillé, Lise Marie
AU - Simons, Raymond C.
AU - De La Vega, Alexander
AU - Weiner, Benjamin J.
AU - Wilkins, Stephen M.
N1 - Funding Information:
T.A.H. and A.Y. are supported by appointment to the NASA Postdoctoral Program (NPP) at NASA Goddard Space Flight Center, administered by Oak Ridge Associated Universities under contract with NASA. C.P. thanks Marsha and Ralph Schilling for the generous support of this research. This work benefited from support from the George P. and Cynthia Woods Mitchell Institute for Fundamental Physics and Astronomy at Texas A&M University. D.K. acknowledges support from NASA grants JWST-ERS-01345 and JWST-AR-02446. J.R.T. acknowledges support from NSF grant CAREER-1945546. D.B. and M.H.-C. thank the Programme National de Cosmologie et Galaxies and CNES for their support. R.A. acknowledges support from Fondecyt Regular 1202007. S.F. acknowledges funding from NASA through the NASA Hubble Fellowship grant HST-HF2-51505.001-A awarded by STScI. A.Z. acknowledges support from grant No. 2020750 from the United States–Israel Binational Science Foundation (BSF) and grant No. 2109066 from the United States National Science Foundation (NSF) and from the Ministry of Science & Technology, Israel.
Funding Information:
We thank Xiaohui Fan, Dan Stark, and Rafaella Schneider for their helpful conversations. This work acknowledges support from the NASA/ESA/CSA JWST through the Space Telescope Science Institute (STScI), operated by the Association of Universities for Research in Astronomy, Incorporated, under NASA contract NAS5-03127. Support for program No. JWST-ERS01345 was provided through a grant from the STScI under NASA contract NAS5-03127.
Publisher Copyright:
© 2023. The Author(s). Published by the American Astronomical Society.
PY - 2023/8
Y1 - 2023/8
N2 - 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.
AB - 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.
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=85170080122&partnerID=8YFLogxK
U2 - 10.3847/2041-8213/ace619
DO - 10.3847/2041-8213/ace619
M3 - Article
AN - SCOPUS:85170080122
SN - 2041-8205
VL - 953
JO - Astrophysical Journal Letters
JF - Astrophysical Journal Letters
IS - 2
M1 - L29
ER -