HEASARC Office
 

Upcoming Events

Thursday, March 28, 2024
08:00 AM - 05:00 PM
No Meeting Week
All are encouraged to cancel or reschedule their meetings between 3/25/24 and 3/29/24.
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Thursday, March 28, 2024
03:00 PM - 04:00 PM
AGN Seminar (Hybrid)
Painting the Cosmos Red: JWST Insights into Red Super Massive Black Holes
Vasily Korkorev (University of Groningen)

Deep observations with JWST have revealed an emerging population of red point-like sources that could provide a link between the postulated supermassive black hole seeds and observed quasars. In this talk I 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 Hβ line. Combining the derived black hole mass with the detailed modeling of the spectral energy distribution in the optical and near-infrared, together with constraints from ALMA we find 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 is consistent with recent AGN studies at high redshift with JWST. In conjunction with other literature works on high-z quasars this finding suggests that a non-negligible fraction of supermassive black holes either started out from massive seeds and/or grew at a super-Eddington rate at high redshift. It is clear that these objects play an important role in the story of black hole growth at early times, however so far a systematic review of these enigmatic AGN across multiple fields has not been undertaken. To this end, I will present my most recent work which explores deep JWST photometry in blank fields, covering ~0.2 deg^2, to select and study a statistical sample of these enigmatic red compact objects.

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Friday, March 29, 2024
08:00 AM - 05:00 PM
No Meeting Week
All are encouraged to cancel or reschedule their meetings between 3/25/24 and 3/29/24.
Read more about this event