Monster black hole found in the early universe
The second-most distant quasar ever discovered now has a Hawaiian name


Date:
June 25, 2020
Source:
W. M. Keck Observatory
Summary:
Astronomers have discovered the second-most distant quasar ever
found. It is the first quasar to receive an indigenous Hawaiian
name, Poniua'ena.

Data show the supermassive black hole powering Poniua'ena
is surprisingly massive, challenging current theories of how
supermassive black holes formed and grew in the young universe.



FULL STORY ========================================================================== Astronomers have discovered the second-most distant quasar ever found
using three Maunakea Observatories in Hawai'i: W. M. Keck Observatory,
the international Gemini Observatory, a Program of NSF's NOIRLab,
and the University of Hawai'i-owned United Kingdom Infrared Telescope
(UKIRT). It is the first quasar to receive an indigenous Hawaiian name, Poniua'ena, which means "unseen spinning source of creation, surrounded
with brilliance" in the Hawaiian language.


========================================================================== Poniua'ena is only the second quasar yet detected at a distance calculated
at a cosmological redshift greater than 7.5 and it hosts a black hole
twice as large as the other quasar known in the same era. The existence of these massive black holes at such early times challenges current theories
of how supermassive black holes formed and grew in the young universe.

The research has been accepted in the Astrophysical Journal Letters.

Quasars are the most energetic objects in the universe powered by their supermassive black holes and since their discovery, astronomers have
been keen to determine when they first appeared in our cosmic history. By systematically searching for these rare objects in wide-area sky surveys, astronomers discovered the most distant quasar (named J1342+0928) in 2018
and now the second-most distant, Poniua'ena (or J1007+2115, at redshift
7.515). The light seen from Poniua'ena traveled through space for over
13 billion years since leaving the quasar just 700 million years after
the Big Bang.

Spectroscopic observations from Keck Observatory and Gemini Observatory
show the supermassive black hole powering Poniua'ena is 1.5 billion
times more massive than our Sun.

Poniua'ena is the most distant object known in the universe hosting
a black hole exceeding one billion solar masses," said Jinyi Yang,
a postdoctoral research associate at the Steward Observatory of the
University of Arizona and lead author of the study.



==========================================================================
For a black hole of this size to form this early in the universe,
it would need to start as a 10,000 solar mass "seed" black hole about
100 million years after the Big Bang, rather than growing from a much
smaller black hole formed by the collapse of a single star.

"How can the universe produce such a massive black hole so early in its history?" said Xiaohui Fan, Regents' professor and associate department
head of the Department of Astronomy at the University of Arizona. "This discovery presents the biggest challenge yet for the theory of black hole formation and growth in the early universe." Current theory holds the
birth of stars and galaxies as we know them started during the Epoch of Reionization, beginning about 400 million years after the Big Bang. The
growth of the first giant black holes is thought to have occurred during
that same era in the universe's history.

The discovery of quasars like Poniua'ena, deep into the reionization
epoch, is a big step towards understanding this process of reionization
and the formation of early supermassive black holes and massive
galaxies. Poniua'ena has placed new and important constraints on the
evolution of the matter between galaxies (intergalactic medium) in the reionization epoch.

"Poniua'ena acts like a cosmic lighthouse. As its light travels the
long journey towards Earth, its spectrum is altered by diffuse gas in
the intergalactic medium which allowed us to pinpoint when the Epoch of Reionization occurred," said co-author Joseph Hennawi, a professor in
the Department of Physics at the University of California, Santa Barbara.

METHODOLOGY Yang's team first detected Poniua'ena as a possible quasar
after combing through large area surveys such as the UKIRT Hemisphere
Survey and data from the University of Hawai'i Institute for Astronomy's Pan-STARRS1 telescope on the Island of Maui.

In 2019, the researchers observed the object using Gemini Observatory's
GNIRS instrument as well as Keck Observatory's Near Infrared Echellette Spectrograph (NIRES) to confirm the existence of Poniua'ena.

"The preliminary data from Gemini suggested this was likely to be an
important discovery. Our team had observing time scheduled at Keck just a
few weeks later, perfectly timed to observe the new quasar using Keck's
NIRES spectrograph in order to confirm its extremely high redshift
and measure the mass of its black hole," said co-author Aaron Barth,
a professor in the Department of Physics and Astronomy at the University
of California, Irvine.


========================================================================== Story Source: Materials provided by W._M._Keck_Observatory. Note:
Content may be edited for style and length.


========================================================================== Related Multimedia:
* Artist's_impression_of_the_formation_of_the_quasar_Poniua'ena ========================================================================== Journal Reference:
1. Jinyi Yang, Feige Wang, Xiaohui Fan, Joseph F. Hennawi, Frederick B.

Davies, Minghao Yue, Eduardo Banados, Xue-Bing Wu, Bram Venemans,
Aaron J. Barth, Fuyan Bian, Konstantina Boutsia, Roberto Decarli,
Emanuele Paolo Farina, Richard Green, Linhua Jiang, Jiang-Tao
Li, Chiara Mazzucchelli, Fabian Walter. Pōniuā'ena:
A Luminous z=7.5 Quasar Hosting a 1.5 Billion Solar Mass Black
Hole. Astrophysical Journal Letters, 2020 [link] ==========================================================================

Link to news story: https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2020/06/200625140723.htm

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