Thread by @SaturnsWings

IT'S TIMEEEE!!! My first paper on our @ceers_jwst data is out, and oh wow, was it an exciting (and exhausting) experience!

We found the most distant (to-date) active black hole at the center of a galaxy ~570 Myrs after the Big Bang (>13.2B yrs ago)!!

arxiv.org/abs/2303.08918

Before I delve into the details, I want to take a moment to give my sincerest thanks to my coauthors and the @ceers_jwst team. This paper has 50 authors, and I could not have done it without every single one of you. Your enthusiasm and expertise are invaluable. Thank you.

This source (then EGSY8p7) was originally found in @NASAHubble images by @grobertsborsani et al. and had a spectroscopic redshift of z=8.7 from a Lya detection with @keckobservatory by Adi Zitrin et al. in 2015! aasnova.org/2015/12/22/sel…

This target was the brightest known high-redshift galaxy in our @ceers_jwst program, so, we pointed ALL FOUR of our #JWST instruments at it! We have spectra from NIRSpec & NIRCam/WFSS, plus imaging from MIRI & NIRCam. Below is an image that @Jeyhan made, and I cried over 🤩

I always get so engrossed in the spectra, especially the new spectra from #JWST, which are mind-boggling (below), that I forget we have actual images of them! These galaxies have only been little dots, but now we see FEATURES. That bright dot in the middle is an ACTIVE BLACK HOLE

Seriously though, these spectra are WILD! Look at ALL OF THE EMISSION LINES we find in this one galaxy!! I have never in my little high-redshift galaxy life seen more than TWO (those very left two), and we find FIFTEEN! This is truly an INSANE telescope, & I'm so lucky to use it!

One of the first things I noticed when getting our spectra in was, ok, yes, how many lines there were, but also that one of them looked a little ... unexpected. This Hydrogen line (Hbeta) has a broad component (red) which is typically caused by an active galactic nucleus (AGN)

Why is this unexpected? Great question! One I asked of my coauthors as well! Well, an AGN is an actively-accreting black hole, and when we measure the size of the black hole from this Hb line, we find that it's 'quite small' ~ 10^7 times the mass of the Sun (gold star below).

How did we get such a big black hole relative to the galaxy's mass so early in the Universe (~570Myr after the big bang)? We don't know! But we can make some educated guesses! Below is a beautiful illustration by @astrosteven on different formation scenarios.

We're just starting to get a glimpse into the early Universe, where galaxies and AGN aren't two distinct populations but rather growing together. Making typical distinguishing diagnostic measurements difficult to disentangle. The "OHNO" diagram by @aibhleog illustrates this issue

This is an exciting time for studies of the early Universe and the galaxies that existed over 13b years ago. I'm so excited to share this discovery with you, especially with my @ceers_jwst team & my collaborators. To all the humans who made #JWST possible, this one's for you <3

Just one last moment of extra thanks to @Richarwirman, who spent hundreds of hours planning our @ceers_jwst NIRSpec observations and without whom none of us would have this data. Thank you! Can't wait for you to share your paper too!!

@Richarwirman @ceers_jwst And because Twitter won't let me tag more than 10 people at a time and this was a HUGE team effort, more of my coauthors: @astrocaits @BenneHolwerda @Prof_McGrath @PGPerezGonzalez @janerrigby @stewilkins @lyAaronYung

Everyone worked so hard to get this paper out, even digging through our data from other telescopes and adding in EVERYTHING we could find about this galaxy! @JorgZavala and @PGPerezGonzalez looked at this source in our images from Spitzer, Herschel, SCUBA-2, and the VLA!

Guang Yang also combed through our @chandraxray images at this location and taught me how WEIRD x-ray data is. We do not detect CEERS_1019 in the x-ray data, keying into how unstudied these Seyfert-like AGN are in the early Universe.