Discovery of merging twin quasars at z = 6.05
| Autor: | Matsuoka, Yoshiki, Izumi, Takuma, Onoue, Masafusa, Strauss, Michael A., Iwasawa, Kazushi, Kashikawa, Nobunari, Akiyama, Masayuki, Aoki, Kentaro, Arita, Junya, Imanishi, Masatoshi, Ishimoto, Rikako, Kawaguchi, Toshihiro, Kohno, Kotaro, Lee, Chien-Hsiu, Nagao, Tohru, Silverman, John D., Toba, Yoshiki |
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| Rok vydání: | 2024 |
| Předmět: | |
| Zdroj: | The Astrophysical Journal Letters, Volume 965, Issue 1, id.L4, 8 pp (2024) |
| Druh dokumentu: | Working Paper |
| DOI: | 10.3847/2041-8213/ad35c7 |
| Popis: | We report the discovery of two quasars at a redshift of $z$ = 6.05, in the process of merging. They were serendipitously discovered from the deep multi-band imaging data collected by the Hyper Suprime-Cam (HSC) Subaru Strategic Program survey. The quasars, HSC $J$121503.42$-$014858.7 (C1) and HSC $J$121503.55$-$014859.3 (C2), both have luminous ($>$10$^{43}$ erg s$^{-1}$) Ly$\alpha$ emission with a clear broad component (full width at half maximum $>$1000 km s$^{-1}$). The rest-frame ultraviolet (UV) absolute magnitudes are $M_{1450} = -23.106 \pm 0.017$ (C1) and $-22.662 \pm 0.024$ (C2). Our crude estimates of the black hole masses provide $\log (M_{\rm BH}/M_\odot) = 8.1 \pm 0.3$ in both sources. The two quasars are separated by 12 kpc in projected proper distance, bridged by a structure in the rest-UV light suggesting that they are undergoing a merger. This pair is one of the most distant merging quasars reported to date, providing crucial insight into galaxy and black hole build-up in the hierarchical structure formation scenario. A companion paper will present the gas and dust properties captured by Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array observations, which provide additional evidence for and detailed measurements of the merger and also demonstrate that the two sources are not gravitationally-lensed images of a single quasar. Comment: Published from ApJL. A companion paper (T. Izumi et al.) presents the associated ALMA observations |
| Databáze: | arXiv |
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