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Protoclusters, the progenitors of galaxy clusters, trace large scale structures in the early Universe and are important to our understanding of structure formation and galaxy evolution. To date, only a handful of protoclusters have been identified in the Epoch of Reionization. As one of the rarest populations in the early Universe, distant quasars that host active supermassive black holes are thought to reside in the most massive dark matter halos at that cosmic epoch and could thus potentially pinpoint some of the earliest protoclusters. In this Letter, we report the discovery of a massive protocluster around a luminous quasar atz= 6.63. This protocluster is anchored by the quasar and includes three [Cii] emitters atz∼ 6.63, 12 spectroscopically confirmed Lyαemitters (LAEs) at 6.54 <z≤ 6.64, and a large number of narrow-band-imaging selected LAE candidates at the same redshift. This structure has an overall overdensity of$\delta ={3.3}_{-0.9}^{+1.1}$within ∼35 × 74 cMpc²on the sky and an extreme overdensity ofδ> 30 in its central region (i.e.,R≲ 2 cMpc). We estimate that this protocluster will collapse into a galaxy cluster with a mass of${6.9}_{-1.4}^{+1.2}\times {10}^{15}{M}_{\odot }$at the current epoch, more massive than the most massive clusters known in the local Universe such as Coma. In the quasar vicinity, we discover a double-peaked LAE, which implies that the quasar has a UV lifetime greater than 0.8 Myrs and has already ionized its surrounding intergalactic medium.

 

Abstract The MAMMOTH-1 nebula at z = 2.317 is an enormous Ly α nebula (ELAN) extending to a ∼440 kpc scale at the center of the extreme galaxy overdensity BOSS 1441. In this paper, we present observations of the CO(3 − 2) and 250 GHz dust-continuum emission from MAMMOTH-1 using the IRAM NOrthern Extended Millimeter Array. Our observations show that CO(3 − 2) emission in this ELAN has not extended widespread emission into the circum- and inter-galactic media. We also find a remarkable concentration of six massive galaxies in CO(3 − 2) emission in the central ∼100 kpc region of the ELAN. Their velocity dispersions suggest a total halo mass of M 200 c ∼ 10 13.1 M ⊙ , marking a possible protocluster core associated with the ELAN. The peak position of the CO(3 − 2) line emission from the obscured AGN is consistent with the location of the intensity peak of MAMMOTH-1 in the rest-frame UV band. Its luminosity line ratio between the CO(3 − 2) and CO(1 − 0) r 3,1 is 0.61 ± 0.17. The other five galaxies have CO(3 − 2) luminosities in the range of (2.1–7.1) × 10 9 K km s −1 pc 2 , with the star-formation rates derived from the 250 GHz continuum of (<36)–224 M ⊙ yr −1 . Follow-up spectroscopic observations will further confirm more member galaxies and improve the accuracy of the halo mass estimation.