Abstract
Early JWST observations have uncovered a population of red sources that might represent a previously overlooked phase of supermassive black hole growth1,2,3. One of the most intriguing examples is an extremely red, point-like object that was found to be triply imaged by the strong lensing cluster Abell 2744 (ref. 4). Here we present deep JWST/NIRSpec observations of this object, Abell2744-QSO1. The spectroscopy confirms that the three images are of the same object, and that it is a highly reddened (AV ≃ 3) broad emission line active galactic nucleus at a redshift of zspec = 7.0451 ± 0.0005. From the width of Hβ (full width at half-maximum = 2,800 ± 250 km s−1), we derive a black hole mass of \({M}_{{\rm{BH}}}={4}_{-1}^{+2}\times 1{0}^{7}\,{M}_{\odot }\). We infer a very high ratio of black-hole-to-galaxy mass of at least 3%, an order of magnitude more than that seen in local galaxies5 and possibly as high as 100%. The lack of strong metal lines in the spectrum together with the high bolometric luminosity (Lbol = (1.1 ± 0.3) × 1045 erg s−1) indicate that we are seeing the black hole in a phase of rapid growth, accreting at 30% of the Eddington limit. The rapid growth and high black-hole-to-galaxy mass ratio of Abell2744-QSO1 suggest that it may represent the missing link between black hole seeds6 and one of the first luminous quasars7.
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Data availability
The raw JWST data used in this work are publicly available on the Barbara A. Mikulski Archive for Space Telescopes (MAST). These observations specifically are associated with the JWST GO program no. 2561, JWST ERS program no. 1324, and JWST DD program no. 2756. The reduced UNCOVER mosaics, catalogues, lens models as well as spectra are part of the public data release by the UNCOVER team9,12,49 (S.H.P. et al., manuscript in preparation). The public ALMA data can be found on the ESO Science Archive under IDs 2018.1.00035.L and 2013.1.00999.S. The deep Chandra image used here comprises data from more than 60 individual programs that are available on the Chandra Data Archive. The individual observations IDs are listed in table 1 of ref. 55. Source data are provided with this paper.
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Acknowledgements
We thank the anonymous referees for their comments and suggestions that helped in improving this paper. A.Z. and L.J.F. acknowledge the support from the United States–Israel Binational Science Foundation (BSF) under grant 2020750 and the US National Science Foundation (NSF) under grant 2109066, and from the Ministry of Science and Technology, Israel. H.A. and I.C. acknowledge support from the CNES, focused on the JWST mission, and the Programme National Cosmology and Galaxies (PNCG) of CNRS/INSU with INP and IN2P3, co-funded by the CEA and CNES. P.D. acknowledges support from the NWO grant 016.VIDI.189.162 (‘ODIN’) and the CO-FUND Rosalind Franklin programme of the European Commission and University of Groningen. S.F. acknowledges support from NASA through the NASA Hubble Fellowship grant HST-HF2-51505.001-A, awarded by the Space Telescope Science Institute (STScI). The Cosmic Dawn Center (DAWN) is funded by the Danish National Research Foundation under grant no. 140. Support for the program JWST-GO-2561 was provided through a grant from the STScI under NASA contract NAS 5-03127. This work has received funding from the Swiss State Secretariat for Education, Research and Innovation (SERI) under contract no. MB22.00072, as well as from the Swiss National Science Foundation (SNSF) through project grant 200020_207349. This work is based on observations obtained with the NASA/ESA/CSA JWST, retrieved from the MAST at the STScI, which is operated by the Association of Universities for Research in Astronomy under NASA contract NAS 5-26555. This work is also based on observations made with ESO Telescopes at the La Silla Paranal Observatory and the ALMA, obtained from the ESO Science Archive facility. ALMA is a partnership of ESO (representing its member states), NSF (United States) and NINS (Japan), together with NRC (Canada), MOST and ASIAA (Taiwan), and KASI (Republic of Korea), in cooperation with the Republic of Chile. The Joint ALMA Observatory is operated by the ESO, AUI/NRAO and NAOJ. The National Radio Astronomy Observatory (NRAO) is a facility of the NSF operated under a cooperative agreement by the Associated Universities. This work was made possible by using the CANDIDE cluster at the Institut d’Astrophysique de Paris, which was funded through grants from the PNCG, CNES, DIM-ACAV and the Cosmic Dawn Center and is maintained by S. Rouberol. Cloud-based data processing and file storage for this work were provided by the AWS Cloud Credits for Research programme.
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A.Z., J.E.G. and L.J.F. wrote the paper. L.J.F. made the figures. L.J.F. and I.L. performed the line fits. I.L. designed the program and produced the deep spectrum. R.B. and I.L. reduced the data. L.J.F. and A.Z. constructed the lens model. P.D. provided simulations to contextualize the observational results obtained. V.K. and I.L. measured the emission line strengths. I.C. ran the completeness simulations. T.B.M., D.J.S. and E.N. measured the source size. I.L. and R.B. are the principal investigators of the UNCOVER program. All authors contributed to the paper and aided the analysis and interpretation.
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Furtak, L.J., Labbé, I., Zitrin, A. et al. A high black-hole-to-host mass ratio in a lensed AGN in the early Universe. Nature 628, 57–61 (2024). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41586-024-07184-8
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/s41586-024-07184-8
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