Related papers: Physical properties of the first quasars
This review attempts to describe developments in the fields of quasar and quasar host galaxies in the past five. In this time period, the Sloan and 2dF quasar surveys have added several tens of thousands of quasars, with Sloan quasars being…
Nearly 300 quasars have now been found at $z >$ 6, including nine at $z >$ 7. They are thought to form from the collapse of supermassive primordial stars to 10$^4$ - 10$^5$ M$_{\odot}$ black holes at $z \sim$ 20 - 25, which then rapidly…
The next generation of electromagnetic and gravitational wave observatories will open unprecedented windows to the birth of the first supermassive black holes. This has the potential to reveal their origin and growth in the first billion…
This article reviews and discusses 1) the discovery and early work on the evolution of quasars and AGNs, 2) the different techniques used to find quasars and their suitability for evolutionary studies, 3) the current status of our knowledge…
Observations of the most luminous quasars at redshift z>6 reveal the existence of numerous supermasssive black holes (>10^9 Msun) already in place about twelve billion years ago. In addition, the interstellar medium of the galaxies hosting…
Quasars are galaxies hosting accreting supermassive black holes; due to their brightness, they are unique probes of the early universe. To date, only few quasars have been reported at $z > 6.5$ ($<$800 Myr after the Big Bang). In this work,…
The discovery of high redshift quasars represents a challenge to the origin of supermassive black holes. Here, two evolutionary scenarios are considered. The first one concerns massive black holes in the local universe, which in a large…
A significant population of quasars have been found to exist within the first Gyr of cosmic time. Most of them have high black hole (BH) masses ($M_{\rm BH} \sim 10^{8-10} M_{\odot}$) with an elevated BH-to-stellar mass ratio compared to…
The existence of massive black holes was postulated in the sixties, when the first quasars were discovered. In the late nineties their reality was proven beyond doubt, in the Milky way and a handful nearby galaxies. Since then, enormous…
Quasars are the earliest objects known to exist. We examine their origin in the context of popular models for structure formation in the universe. We show that seeds for quasar black holes could have originated from the initial cosmological…
I review the current understanding of some key properties of the earliest growing supermassive black holes (SMBHs), as determined from the most up-to-date observations of z>=5 quasars. This includes their accretion rates and growth history,…
Quasars at z>4 provide direct information on the first massive structures to form in the Universe. Recent ground-based optical surveys (e.g., the Sloan Digital Sky Survey) have discovered large numbers of high-redshift quasars, increasing…
In this chapter, we review the current observational status of the first supermassive black holes. It is clear that such a review can hardly be complete, due to the wealth of surveys that has been pursued, including different wavelengths…
With detections of quasars powered by increasingly massive black holes (BHs) at increasingly early times in cosmic history over the past decade, there has been correspondingly rapid progress made on the theory of early BH formation and…
The formation of the first massive objects in the infant Universe remains impossible to observe directly and yet it sets the stage for the subsequent evolution of galaxies. While some black holes with masses > billion solar masses? have…
Luminous quasars at $z>4$ provide key insights into the early Universe. Their rarity necessitates wide-field multi-band surveys to efficiently separate them from the main astrophysical contaminants (i.e., ultracool dwarfs). To expand the…
Quasars at cosmic dawn provide powerful probes of the formation and growth of the earliest supermassive black holes (SMBHs) in the universe, their connections to galaxy and structure formation, and the evolution of the intergalactic medium…
The emergence of the first black holes during the first billion years of cosmic history marks a key event in cosmology. Their formation is part of the overall process of ending the cosmic dark ages, when the first stars appeared in low-mass…
High-redshift quasars are currently the only probes of the growth of supermassive black holes and potential tracers of structure evolution at early cosmic time. Here we present our candidate selection criteria from the Panoramic Survey…
We explore the consequences of a novel but increasingly well-supported hypothesis that supermassive black holes may have formed from primordial black holes form ed prior to, and rapidly growing in, the radiation-dominated universe. We show…