In what may be our final story from the AAS meeting, we’d like to share the discovery of one of the earliest forming massive galaxies in our universe. Cataloged with the phone number J0313-1806, this object was detected in part from the DESI survey, which we discussed last week. This object now holds the record for the most distant galaxy ever seen, and its light has been traveling to reach us for more than 13 billion years. The only reason we can see this system is it is truly massive in just about every way.

This system has a huge supermassive black hole that is 1.6×10^9 solar masses, or a thousand times larger than the supermassive black hole in our own Milky Way galaxy. The system is undergoing massive amounts of star formation and is creating two hundred stars per year, compared to our own galaxy’s roughly one star per year. It’s an amazing system, and to be entirely honest, it is also totally unexpected. 

In order to get a system this big, either massive amounts of material had to collapse all at once to form that supermassive black hole and galaxy, or stellar-mass black holes needed to form and then merge at a rate we didn’t think was possible. According to lead study co-author Xiaohui Fan: We have to look much earlier [in the universe] and look for much less massive black holes to see how these things grow. 

This kind of research may require the JWST, so here is to hoping it can finally get off the ground later this year. This work will appear soon in The Astrophysical Journal Letters and was led by Feige Wang of the University of Arizona.

More Information

The University of Arizona press release

NOIRLab press release

Keck Observatory press release

“A Luminous Quasar at Redshift 7.642,” Feige Wang et al., to be published in Astrophysical Journal Letters (preprint on arxiv.org)