James Webb Space Telescope Feed Post

EIGER III. JWST/NIRCam observations of the ultra-luminous high-redshift quasar J0100+2802 Published: 11/29/2022 4:48:57 PM Updated: 5/18/2023 4:41:57 PM

Paper abstract: We present the first rest-frame optical spectrum of a high-redshift quasar observed with JWST/NIRCam in Wide Field Slitless (WFSS) mode. The observed quasar, J0100+2802, is the most luminous quasar known at z>6. We measure the mass of the central supermassive black hole (SMBH) by means of the rest-frame optical H\beta emission line, and find consistent mass measurements of the quasar's SMBH of M_\bullet~10^{10}\,M_\odot when compared to the estimates based on the properties of rest-frame UV emission lines CIV and MgII, which are accessible from ground-based observatories. To this end, we also present a newly reduced rest-frame UV spectrum of the quasar observed with X-Shooter/VLT and FIRE/Magellan for a total of 16.8 hours. We readdress the question whether this ultra-luminous quasar could be effected by strong gravitational lensing making use of the diffraction limited NIRCam images in three different wide band filters (F115W, F200W, F356W), which improves the achieved spatial resolution compared to previous images taken with the Hubble Space Telescope by a factor of two. We do not find any evidence for a foreground deflecting galaxy, nor for multiple images of the quasar, and determine the probability for magnification due to strong gravitational lensing with image separations below the diffraction limit of \Delta\theta\lesssim 0.05'' to be \lesssim 2.2\times 10^{-3}. Our observations therefore confirm that this quasar hosts a ten billion solar mass black hole less than 1 Gyr after the Big Bang, which is challenging to explain with current black hole formation models.