The discovery of billion-solar-mass black holes within the first Gigayear of cosmic history presents an intriguing puzzle: how did supermassive black holes (SMBHs) grow so rapidly in such a short amount of cosmic time? In this talk, I will present recent advances in probing the earliest phases of SMBH growth using recent observations from the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST). I will show the first measurements of the clustering strength and duty cycle of luminous high-redshift quasars, discuss new insights from the population of "Little Red Dots", highlight time-domain observations that reveal the structure of early quasar accretion disks, and show results from deep spectroscopy of galaxies lying behind a luminous quasar, which allow us to tomographically reconstruct the quasar’s radiative history and ionized bubbles during the Epoch of Reionization.
Speaker: Anna-Christina Eilers, MIT
Host: Claude-André Faucher-Giguére