Warm gas in the vicinity of a supermassive black hole 13 billion years ago

IF 12.9 1区物理与天体物理 Q1 ASTRONOMY & ASTROPHYSICS

Nature Astronomy Pub Date : 2025-03-07 DOI:10.1038/s41550-025-02505-x

K. Tadaki, F. Esposito, L. Vallini, T. Tsukui, T. Saito, D. Iono, T. Michiyama

引用次数: 0

Abstract

Quasars, powered by supermassive black holes, are among the brightest objects in the Universe. In the vicinity of a supermassive black hole, X-ray photons from an active galactic nucleus can heat the surrounding gas to several hundred kelvin. Here we report observations of dust continuum and carbon monoxide (CO) J = 13–12 and J = 14–13 line emissions at a resolution of 130 pc in a luminous quasar at a redshift of 6. We successfully detected these high-J CO line emissions from warm gas in a compact disk component. The CO luminosity ratio in the central region of the compact disk is consistent with theoretical models in which X-ray heating dominates the CO excitation and the gas column density is as high as 10²⁵ cm⁻². This finding demonstrates that high-resolution observations of high-J CO lines are promising ways to identify extremely dust-obscured quasars in the early Universe.

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来源期刊

Nature Astronomy Physics and Astronomy-Astronomy and Astrophysics

CiteScore

19.50

自引率

2.80%

发文量

252

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