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1. Predicting the Yields of z > 6.5 Quasar Surveys in the Era of Roman and Rubin

   https://doi.org/10.3847/1538-4357/acf12d  

   Tee, Wei Leong; Fan, Xiaohui; Wang, Feige; Yang, Jinyi; Malhotra, Sangeeta; Rhoads, James E. (October 2023, The Astrophysical Journal)

   Abstract About 70 luminous quasars discovered atz> 6.5 are strongly biased toward the bright end, thus not providing a comprehensive view of quasar abundance beyond the cosmic dawn. We present the predicted results of the Roman/Rubin high-redshift quasar survey, yielding 3 times more, 2–4 mag deeper quasar samples, probing high-redshift quasars across a broad range of luminosities, especially faint quasars atL_bol∼ 10¹⁰L_⊙orM₁₄₅₀∼ −22, which are currently poorly explored. We include high-zquasars, galactic dwarfs, and low-zcompact galaxies with similar colors as quasar candidates. We create mock catalogs based on population models to evaluate selection completeness and efficiency. We utilize the classical color dropout method in thezandYbands to select primary quasar candidates, followed up with the Bayesian selection method to identify quasars. We show that overall selection completeness >80% and efficiency ∼10% at 6.5 <z< 9, with 180 quasars atz> 6.5, 20 atz> 7.5, and 2 atz> 8.5. The quasar yields depend sensitively on the assumed quasar luminosity shape and redshift evolution. Brown dwarf rejection through proper motion up to 50% can be made for stars brighter than 25 mag, low-zgalaxies dominate at fainter magnitude. Our results show that Roman/Rubin are able to discover a statistical sample of the earliest and faintest quasars in the Universe. The new valuable data sets are worth follow-up studies with JWST and Extremely Large Telescopes to determine the quasar luminosity function faint end slope and constraint the supermassive black holes growth in the early Universe. 

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2. The host galaxies of radio-loud quasars at z > 5 with ALMA

   https://doi.org/10.1051/0004-6361/202451290  

   Mazzucchelli, C; Decarli, R; Belladitta, S; Bañados, E; Meyer, R A; Connor, T; Momjian, E; Rojas-Ruiz, S; Eilers, A-C; Khusanova, Y; et al (February 2025, Astronomy & Astrophysics)

   The interaction between radio jets and quasar host galaxies plays a paramount role in quasar and galaxy co-evolution. However, very little is known at present about this interaction at very high−z. Here, we present new Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA) observations in Bands 7 and 3 of six radio-loud (RL) quasar host galaxies atz > 5. We recovered [C II] 158 μm line and underlying dust continuum emission at > 2σfor five sources, while we obtained upper limits for the CO(6-5) emission line and continuum for the remaining source. At the spatial resolution of our observations (∼1″​​_.0–1″​​_.4), we did not recover any perturbed or extended morphologies or kinematics, which are known signatures of potential mergers. These galaxies already host large quantities of gas (∼10¹⁰M_⊙), with [C II] luminosities ofL_[C II] ∼ 10^8 − 9 L_⊙and [C II]-based star formation rates of 30 − 400 M_⊙yr⁻¹. In building their radio/submillimeter (radio/submm) spectral energy distributions (SEDs), we found that in at least four cases, the 1 mm continuum intensity arises from a combination of synchrotron and dust emission. The initial estimation of synchrotron contribution at 300 GHz in these cases is of ≳10%. Assuming a scenario where the continuum emission is solely due to cold dust as an upper limit, we obtained infrared (IR) luminosities ofL_IR ∼ 10^{11 − 12} L_⊙. We compared the properties of the sources inspected here with a large collection of radio-quiet sources from the literature, as well as a sample of RL quasars from previous studies at comparable redshifts. We recovered a mild potential decrease inL_[C II]for the RL sources, which might be due to a suppression of the cool gas emission due to the radio jets. We did not find any [C II] emitting companion galaxy candidate around the five RL quasars observed in Band 7. Given the depth of our dataset, this result is still consistent with what has been observed around radio-quiet quasars. Future higher spatial-resolution observations, over a broader frequency range, of high−zRL quasars hosts will allow us to further improve our understanding of the physics of these sources. 

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3. Molecular Gas Excitation of the Massive Dusty Starburst CRLE and the Main-sequence Galaxy HZ10 at z = 5.7 in the COSMOS Field

   https://doi.org/10.3847/1538-4357/ac403a  

   Vieira, Daniel; Riechers, Dominik A.; Pavesi, Riccardo; Faisst, Andreas L.; Schinnerer, Eva; Scoville, Nicholas Z.; Stacey, Gordon J. (February 2022, The Astrophysical Journal)

   Abstract We report CO(5 → 4) and CO(6 → 5) line observations in the dusty starbursting galaxy CRLE (z= 5.667) and the main-sequence (MS) galaxy HZ10 (z= 5.654) with the Northern Extended Millimeter Array. CRLE is the most luminousz> 5 starburst in the COSMOS field and HZ10 is the most gas-rich “normal” galaxy currently known atz> 5. We find line luminosities for CO(5 → 4) and CO(6 → 5) of (4.9 ± 0.5) and (3.8 ± 0.4) × 10¹⁰K km s⁻¹pc²for CRLE and upper limits of < 0.76 and < 0.60 × 10¹⁰K km s⁻¹pc²for HZ10, respectively. The CO excitation of CRLE appears comparable to otherz> 5 dusty star-forming galaxies. For HZ10, these line luminosity limits provide the first significant constraints of this kind for an MS galaxy atz> 5. We find the upper limit of $L_{5\to 4}^{\prime }/L_{2\to 1}^{\prime }$in HZ10 could be similar to the average value for MS galaxies aroundz≈ 1.5, suggesting that MS galaxies with comparable gas excitation may already have existed one billion years after the Big Bang. For CRLE we determine the most likely values for the H₂density, kinetic temperature, and dust temperature based on excitation modeling of the CO line ladder. We also derive a total gas mass of (7.1 ± 1.3) × 10¹⁰M_⊙. Our findings provide some of the currently most detailed constraints on the gas excitation that sets the conditions for star formation in a galaxy protocluster environment atz> 5. 

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4. The Carousel Lens: A Well-modeled Strong Lens with Multiple Sources Spectroscopically Confirmed by VLT/MUSE

   https://doi.org/10.3847/1538-4357/ad65d3  

   Sheu, William; Cikota, Aleksandar; Huang, Xiaosheng; Glazebrook, Karl; Storfer, Christopher; Agarwal, Shrihan; Schlegel, David J; Suzuki, Nao; Barone, Tania M; Bian, Fuyan; et al (September 2024, The Astrophysical Journal)

   Over the past few years alone, the lensing community has discovered thousands of strong lens candidates, and spectroscopically confirmed hundreds of them. In this time of abundance, it becomes pragmatic to focus our time and resources on the few extraordinary systems, in order to most efficiently study the Universe. In this paper, we present such a system: DESI-090.9854-35.9683, a cluster-scale lens atz_l= 0.49, with seven observed lensed sources around the core, and additional lensed sources further out in the cluster. From the number and the textbook configuration of the lensed images, a tight constraint on the mass potential of the lens is possible. This would allow for detailed analysis on the dark and luminous matter content within galaxy clusters, as well as a probe into dark energy and high-redshift galaxies. We present our spatially resolved kinematic measurements of this system from the Very Large Telescope Multi Unit Spectroscopic Explorer, which confirm five of these source galaxies (in ascending order, atz_s= 0.962, 0.962, 1.166, 1.432, and 1.432). With previous Hubble Space Telescope imaging in the F140W and F200LP bands, we also present a simple flux-based lens model consisting of two power-law profiles that, for a cluster lens, well models the five lensed arc families with redshifts. We determine the mass to beM(<θ_E) = 4.78 × 10¹³M_⊙for the primary mass potential. From the model, we extrapolate the redshift of one of the two source galaxies not yet spectroscopically confirmed to be at $z_{\mathrm{s}}={4.52}_{-0.71}^{+1.03}$. 

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5. Imaging dark matter at the smallest scales with z   ≈ 1 lensed stars

   https://doi.org/10.1051/0004-6361/202450474  

   Diego, Jose M; Kei_Li, Sung; Amruth, Alfred; Meena, Ashish K; Broadhurst, Tom J; Kelly, Patrick L; Filippenko, Alexei V; Williams, Liliya_L R; Zitrin, Adi; Harris, William E; et al (September 2024, Astronomy & Astrophysics)

   Recent observations of caustic-crossing galaxies at redshift 0.7 ≲ z ≲ 1 show a wealth of transient events. Most of them are believed to be microlensing events of highly magnified stars. Earlier work predicts such events should be common near the critical curves (CCs) of galaxy clusters (“near region”), but some are found relatively far away from these CCs (“far region”). We consider the possibility that substructure on milliarcsecond scales (few parsecs in the lens plane) is boosting the microlensing signal in the far region. We study the combined magnification from the macrolens, millilenses, and microlenses (“3M lensing”), when the macromodel magnification is relatively low (common in the far region). After considering realistic populations of millilenses and microlenses, we conclude that the enhanced microlensing rate around millilenses is not sufficient to explain the high fraction of observed events in the far region. Instead, we find that the shape of the luminosity function (LF) of the lensed stars combined with the amount of substructure in the lens plane determines the number of microlensing events found near and far from the CC. By measuringβ(the exponent of the adopted power law LF,dN/dL = ϕ(L)∝(1/L)^β), and the number density of microlensing events at each location, one can create a pseudoimage of the underlying distribution of mass on small scales. We identify two regimes: (i) positive-imaging regime whereβ > 2 and the number density of events is greater around substructures, and (ii) negative-imaging regime whereβ < 2 and the number density of microlensing events is reduced around substructures. This technique opens a new window to map the distribution of dark-matter substructure down to ∼10³ M_⊙. We study the particular case of seven microlensing events found in the Flashlights program in the Dragon arc (z = 0.725). A population of supergiant stars having a steep LF withβ = 2.55_−0.56^+0.72fits the distribution of these events in the far and near regions. We also find that the new microlensing events from JWST observations in this arc imply a surface mass density substructure of Σ_∗= 54M_⊙pc⁻², consistent with the expected population of stars from the intracluster medium. We identify a small region of high density of microlensing events, and interpret it as evidence of a possible invisible substructure, for which we derive a mass of ∼1.3 × 10⁸ M_⊙(within its Einstein radius) in the galaxy cluster. 

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