James Webb Space Telescope Feed Post

Searching for hidden accreting supermassive black holes in the first JWST-EIGER field

Paper abstract: We propose a pilot 200 ks Chandra ACIS-I observation of the JWST-EIGER field centered around the z=6.3 quasar J0100+2802: thanks to a JWST-NIRCam spectroscopic campaign, this field is known to host several galaxy overdensities at z~6, and can therefore represent an ideal region of the sky to search for z~6 accreting SMBHs, since at high redshift the AGN activity is enhanced in overdense fields. These would be the first X-ray-selected AGN at z>=6, the members of a so far missed population of AGN that are less luminous and more obscured than the optically-selected Type 1 QSOs previously observed at this redshift.