Yesterday, the journal Nature published a study by a global group of researchers who have, for the first time, detected stellar-radiation from two galaxies containing quasars. These galaxies formed less than a billion years post-Big Bang and house black holes with masses nearing a billion times that of our Sun. This breakthrough was enabled by the James Webb Space Telescope's (JWST) infrared observations, providing insightful data on the host galaxies' and quasars' masses.
In order from left to right are the full image, the image of the quasar, and the image of the host galaxy after subtracting light from the quasar. Each panel shows the scale of the image in light years. Credits: Ding, Onoue, Silverman, et al, JWST NIRCam 3.6 μm image of HSC J2236+0032.
Study Insights
The quasars under study were found in a survey conducted by the Subaru Telescope situated on Hawaii Island's Mauna Kea volcano. Prior to JWST, the Hubble Space Telescope managed to identify luminous quasar host galaxies when the universe was just shy of 3 billion years old.
Within a few months of JWST's operations commencement, the team observed quasars HSC J2236+0032 and HSC J2255+0251, as they existed when the universe was approximately 860 million years old. Spotting light from a galaxy harboring a quasar is generally challenging, yet the comparatively low brightness of these quasars made them ideal for observations.
The quasars were detected at infrared wavelengths of 3.56 and 1.50 microns via JWST's NIRCam instrument. JWST's NIRSPEC also noted light from J2236+0032. Photometric evaluations revealed these galaxies to be extraordinarily massive, with masses 130 and 34 billion times that of the Sun.
Gas velocity measurements near the quasars imply that the black holes feeding them are 1.4 and 0.2 billion times the Sun's mass. Intriguingly, the black hole to host galaxy mass ratio aligns with that of more recent galaxies. This finding poses a challenge to the existing models of galaxy evolution and their central black holes.
Sources: W. M. Keck Observatory, MPG
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