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      The diverse galaxy counts in the environment of high-redshift massive black holes in Horizon-AGN

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          ABSTRACT

          High-redshift quasars are believed to reside in highly biased regions of the Universe, where black hole growth is sustained by an enhanced number of mergers and by being at the intersection of filaments bringing fresh gas. This assumption should be supported by an enhancement of the number counts of galaxies in the field of view of quasars. While the current observations of quasar environments do not lead to a consensus on a possible excess of galaxies, the future missions JWST, WFIRST, and Euclid will provide new insights on quasar environments, and will substantially increase the number of study-cases. We are in a crucial period, where we need to both understand the current observations and predict how upcoming missions will improve our understanding of BH environments. Using the large-scale simulation Horizon-AGN, we find that statistically the most massive BHs reside in environments with the largest galaxy number counts. However, we find a large variance in galaxy number counts, and some massive BHs do not show enhanced counts in their neighbourhood. Interestingly, some massive BHs have a very close galaxy companion but no further enhancement at larger scales, in agreement with recent observations. We find that AGN feedback in the surrounding galaxies is able to decrease their luminosity and stellar mass, and therefore to make them unobservable when using restrictive galaxy selection criteria. Radiation from the quasars can spread over large distances, which could affect the formation history of surrounding galaxies, but a careful analysis of these processes requires radiative transfer simulations.

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          Cooling functions for low-density astrophysical plasmas

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            The hierarchical formation of the brightest cluster galaxies

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              A luminous quasar at a redshift of z = 7.085.

              The intergalactic medium was not completely reionized until approximately a billion years after the Big Bang, as revealed by observations of quasars with redshifts of less than 6.5. It has been difficult to probe to higher redshifts, however, because quasars have historically been identified in optical surveys, which are insensitive to sources at redshifts exceeding 6.5. Here we report observations of a quasar (ULAS J112001.48+064124.3) at a redshift of 7.085, which is 0.77 billion years after the Big Bang. ULAS J1120+0641 has a luminosity of 6.3 × 10(13)L(⊙) and hosts a black hole with a mass of 2 × 10(9)M(⊙) (where L(⊙) and M(⊙) are the luminosity and mass of the Sun). The measured radius of the ionized near zone around ULAS J1120+0641 is 1.9 megaparsecs, a factor of three smaller than is typical for quasars at redshifts between 6.0 and 6.4. The near-zone transmission profile is consistent with a Lyα damping wing, suggesting that the neutral fraction of the intergalactic medium in front of ULAS J1120+0641 exceeded 0.1.
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                Author and article information

                Journal
                Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society
                Oxford University Press (OUP)
                0035-8711
                1365-2966
                October 2019
                October 11 2019
                October 2019
                October 11 2019
                August 13 2019
                : 489
                : 1
                : 1206-1229
                Affiliations
                [1 ]Center for Computational Astrophysics, Flatiron Institute, 162 5th Avenue, 10010 NY, USA
                [2 ]Institut d’Astrophysique de Paris, Sorbonne Universités, CNRS, UMR 7095, 98 bis bd Arago, 75014 Paris, France
                [3 ]Department of Physics and Astronomy, Rutgers University, 136 Frelinghuysen Rd, Piscataway, NY 08854, USA
                [4 ]Observatoire de la Côte d’Azur, CNRS, Laboratoire Lagrange, Bd de l’Observatoire, CS 34229, F-06304 Nice Cedex 4, France
                [5 ]School of Physics, Korea Institute for Advances Study (KIAS), 85 Hoegiro, Dongdaemun-gu, Seoul 02455, Republic of Korea
                [6 ]Institute for Astronomy, University of Edinburgh, Royal Observatory, Blackford Hill, Edinburgh EH9 3HJ, UK
                [7 ]Subdepartment of Astrophysics, University of Oxford, Keble Road, Oxford OX1 3RH, UK
                Article
                10.1093/mnras/stz2105
                9f1a006a-3583-44f5-a39d-eab49bef7192
                © 2019

                https://academic.oup.com/journals/pages/open_access/funder_policies/chorus/standard_publication_model

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