Affiliation: Kavli Institute for Cosmology / Cavendish Lab., U. Cambridge

Contribution: Invited

Title: Focus on: The Earliest Black Holes

Abstract: The exploration of black holes in the early universe has gone through a revolutionary phase in the past two years, especially thanks to several new discoveries enabled by JWST. I will provide an overview of some of the recent findings, primarily by focusing on some of the deepest JWST spectroscopic programmes. These observations have revealed a large population of accreting black holes at high redshift, with puzzling and intriguing properties, such as large black hole to stellar mass ratios, lack of X-ray and radio emission, frequent presence of deep Balmer absorption features tracing extremely dense gas along the line of sight, as well as various candidate merging black holes. I will highlight how these and other properties can provide important constraints on the early seeding and growth scenarios of black holes in the early Universe.

This contribution can be found here (pdf).