Astronomers detect ancient lonely quasars with murky origins

In very recent times, several discoveries question the from the beginning very implausible Big Bang theory! Here is another one!

"... Quasars have been observed as early as a few hundred million years after the Big Bang, and it’s been a mystery as to how these objects could have grown so bright and massive in such a short amount of cosmic time. ...

in a new MIT-led study, astronomers observed some ancient quasars that appear to be surprisingly alone in the early universe. ...

These lonely quasars are challenging physicists’ understanding of how such luminous objects could have formed so early on in the universe, without a significant source of surrounding matter to fuel their black hole growth. ...

There is a possibility that these quasars may not be as solitary as they appear, but are instead surrounded by galaxies that are heavily shrouded in dust and therefore hidden from view [what else is hidden from the view?].  ...

The five newly observed quasars are among the oldest quasars observed to date. More than 13 billion years old, the objects are thought to have formed between 600 to 700 million years after the Big Bang. ..."

From the abstract (abstract contains lost graphics):

"We expect luminous (M1450 ≲ −26.5) high-redshift quasars to trace the highest-density peaks in the early Universe. Here, we present observations of four z ≳ 6 quasar fields using JWST/NIRCam in the imaging and wide-field slitless spectroscopy mode and report a wide range in the number of detected [O iii]-emitting galaxies in the quasars' environments, ranging between a density enhancement of δ ≈ 65 within a 2 cMpc radius—one of the largest protoclusters during the Epoch of Reionization discovered to date—to a density contrast consistent with zero, indicating the presence of a UV-luminous quasar in a region comparable to the average density of the Universe. By measuring the two-point cross-correlation function of quasars and their surrounding galaxies, as well as the galaxy autocorrelation function, we infer a correlation length of quasars at 〈z〉 = 6.25 of, while we obtain a correlation length of the [O iii]-emitting galaxies of 

. By comparing the correlation functions to dark-matter-only simulations we estimate the minimum mass of the quasars' host dark matter halos to be 

 (and  for the [O iii] emitters), indicating that (a) luminous quasars do not necessarily reside within the most overdense regions in the early Universe, and that (b) the UV-luminous duty cycle of quasar activity at these redshifts is fduty ≪ 1. Such short quasar activity timescales challenge our understanding of early supermassive black hole growth and provide evidence for highly dust-obscured growth phases or episodic, radiatively inefficient accretion rates."

Astronomers detect ancient lonely quasars with murky origins | MIT News | Massachusetts Institute of Technology "The quasars appear to have few cosmic neighbors, raising questions about how they first emerged more than 13 billion years ago."

EIGER. VI. The Correlation Function, Host Halo Mass, and Duty Cycle of Luminous Quasars at z ≳ 6 (open access)

This image, taken by NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope, shows an ancient quasar (circled in red) with fewer than expected neighboring galaxies (bright spheres), challenging physicists’ understanding of how the first quasars and supermassive black holes formed.