Astronomers have discovered a new, most distant to date, quasar J0313-1806, which existed at a time when the age of the universe was 670 million years. It contains a supermassive black hole with a mass of 1.6 billion times the mass of the Sun, which makes it possible to impose serious restrictions on the formation of “seeds” of black holes in the early Universe. The preprint of the work is published on the arXiv.org website.
Quasars are one of the brightest astronomical objects in the visible Universe; they are the nuclei of distant galaxies at an early stage of formation, in which supermassive black holes actively absorb material from the surrounding accretion disk and can generate high-speed jets (jets). The search and observation of the most distant similar objects makes it possible to test the theories of the formation of supermassive black holes by determining the mass of their “embryos” in the early Universe and estimating the rate of their growth. To date, there are very few observational data for very distant quasars, only two similar objects were detected at redshift z≥7.5.
A group of astronomers led by Feige Wang from the University of Arizona reports the discovery of the most distant bright quasar J0313-1806 to date. Initially, the candidate was found during the analysis of data from ground-based sky surveys Pan-STARRS1, DELS (DESI Legacy Imaging Surveys), VHS (VISTA Hemisphere Survey), as well as the data catalog of the WISE space telescope; later, spectroscopic observations of the quasar were carried out using a radio telescope system ALMA and Gemini Telescopes, Keck Observatory and Magellanic Telescopes.