English

Constraining the AGN luminosity function from JWST with the X-ray Background

Cosmology and Nongalactic Astrophysics 2023-11-16 v3 Astrophysics of Galaxies

Abstract

We predict the X-ray background (XRB) expected from the population of quasars detected by the JWST spectroscopic surveys over the redshift range z47z \sim 4-7. We find that the measured UV emissivities, in combination with a best-fitting quasar SED template, imply a 10\sim 10 times higher unresolved X-ray background than constrained by current experiments. We illustrate the difficulty of simultaneously matching the faint-end of the quasar luminosity function and the X-ray background constraints. We discuss possible origins and consequences of this discrepancy.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2310.08633,
  title  = {Constraining the AGN luminosity function from JWST with the X-ray Background},
  author = {Hamsa Padmanabhan and Abraham Loeb},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2310.08633},
  year   = {2023}
}

Comments

6 pages, 4 figures; minor typos corrected, references updated. Matches version published in ApJL

R2 v1 2026-06-28T12:49:10.292Z