Kavli Affiliate: Kohei Inayoshi
| First 5 Authors: Roberto Maiolino, Hannah Uebler, Francesco D’Eugenio, Jan Scholtz, Ignas Juodzbalis
| Summary:
The recent discovery of a large number of massive black holes within the
first two billion years after the Big Bang, as well as their peculiar
properties, have been largely unexpected based on the extrapolation of the
properties of luminous quasars. These findings have prompted the development of
several theoretical models for the early formation and growth of black holes,
which are, however, difficult to differentiate. We report the metallicity
measurement around a gravitationally lensed massive black hole at redshift
7.04, hosted in a galaxy with very low dynamical mass. The weakness of the
[OIII]5007 emission line relative to the narrow Hbeta emission indicates an
extremely low chemical enrichment, less than 0.01 solar. We argue that such
properties cannot be uncommon among accreting black holes around this early
cosmic epoch. Explaining such a low chemical enrichment in a system that has
developed a massive black hole is challenging for most theories. Models
assuming heavy black hole seeds (such as Direct Collapse Black Holes) or
super-Eddington accretion scenarios struggle to explain the observations,
although they can potentially reproduce the observed properties in rare cases.
Models invoking "primordial black holes" (i.e. putative black holes formed
shortly after the Big Bang) may potentially explain the low chemical enrichment
associated with this black hole.
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