• DOI:10.1038/nature14241
• Corpus ID: 4455954

An ultraluminous quasar with a twelve-billion-solar-mass black hole at redshift 6.30

@article{Wu2015AnUQ,
  title={An ultraluminous quasar with a twelve-billion-solar-mass black hole at redshift 6.30},
  author={Xue-bing Wu and Feige Wang and Xiaohui Fan and Weimin Yi and Wenwen Zuo and Fuyan Bian and Linhua Jiang and Ian D. McGreer and Ran Wang and Jinyi Yang and Qian Yang and David H. Thompson and Yuri Beletsky},
  journal={Nature},
  year={2015},
  volume={518},
  pages={512-515}
}

• Xue-bing Wu, Feige Wang, +10 authors Y. Beletsky
• Published 26 February 2015
• Physics
• Nature

So far, roughly 40 quasars with redshifts greater than z = 6 have been discovered. Each quasar contains a black hole with a mass of about one billion solar masses (109 ). The existence of such black holes when the Universe was less than one billion years old presents substantial challenges to theories of the formation and growth of black holes and the coevolution of black holes and galaxies. Here we report the discovery of an ultraluminous quasar, SDSS J010013.02+280225.8, at redshift z = 6.30. It has an optical and near-infrared luminosity a few times greater than those of previously known z > 6 quasars. On the basis of the deep absorption trough on the blue side of the Lyman-α emission line in the spectrum, we estimate the proper size of the ionized proximity zone associated with the quasar to be about 26 million light years, larger than found with other z > 6.1 quasars with lower luminosities. We estimate (on the basis of a near-infrared spectrum) that the black hole has a mass of ∼1.2 × 1010 , which is consistent with the 1.3 × 1010 derived by assuming an Eddington-limited accretion rate.