James Webb Space Telescope Feed Post

IOP Science: UNCOVER: A NIRSpec Identification of a Broad-line AGN at z = 8.50

Paper abstract: Deep observations with the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) have revealed an emerging population of red pointlike sources that could provide a link between the postulated supermassive black hole seeds and observed quasars. In this work, we present a JWST/NIRSpec spectrum from the JWST Cycle 1 UNCOVER Treasury survey of a massive accreting black hole at z = 8.50 displaying a clear broad-line component as inferred from the Hß line with FWHM = 3439 ± 413 km s-1, typical of the broad-line region of an active galactic nucleus (AGN). The AGN nature of this object is further supported by high ionization, as inferred from emission lines, and a point-source morphology. We compute a black hole mass of {\mathrm{log}}_{10}({M}_{\mathrm{BH}}/{M}_{\odot })=8.17\pm 0.42 and a bolometric luminosity of Lbol ~ 6.6 × 1045 erg s-1. These values imply that our object is accreting at ~40% of the Eddington limit. Detailed modeling of the spectral energy distribution in the optical and near-infrared, together with constraints from ALMA, indicate an upper limit on the stellar mass of {\mathrm{log}}_{10}({M}_{* }/{M}_{\odot })\lt 8.7, which would lead to an unprecedented ratio of black hole to host mass of at least ~30%. This is orders of magnitude higher compared to the local QSOs but consistent with recent AGN studies at high redshift with JWST. This finding suggests that a nonnegligible fraction of supermassive black holes either started out from massive seeds and/or grew at a super-Eddington rate at high redshift. Given the predicted number densities of high-z faint AGN, future NIRSpec observations of larger samples will allow us to further investigate galaxy–black hole coevolution in the early Universe.