Speaker
Description
Quasars at the highest redshifts illuminate the Universe during its first billion years and provide crucial insights into the formation of the earliest supermassive black holes, galaxy evolution, and the epoch of reionization. In this talk, I will present recent advances in discovering and characterizing these distant beacons at the edge of cosmic time. Special attention will be given to recent discoveries from the Euclid mission, which is dramatically opening new windows on the distant Universe through its unprecedented combination of survey area and depth. I will show that in 1.5 years of the Euclid mission, the high-z quasars team has doubled the number of z>7 known quasars, pushing the redshift frontier further into the epoch of reionisation and breaking the record twice. Following discovery, comprehensive multi-wavelength follow-up is essential to unlock the physical properties of these extreme objects. I will showcase observations in the optical and near-infrared regime, to confirm redshifts and probe the black hole masses and accretion properties and sub-millimeter observations to constrain the dust emission and the star formation rate in the host galaxies. This latter will be focused on a particular UV-faint Euclid-discovered quasar which we found to be hosted by a very massive and star-forming galaxy. Together, these multi-wavelength observations paint a detailed picture of the most luminous objects in the early Universe and their host galaxies.
| Collaborators (if any) | The Euclid high-z quasars work package |
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