Abstract

Invited Talk - Plenary

Tuesday, 16 September 2025, 10:00   (Kuppelsaal / virtual plenum)

The Growth of Supermassive Black Holes

Anna-Christina Eilers
MIT Kavli Institute for Astrophysics and Space Research

The discovery of billion-solar-mass black holes within the first Gigayear of cosmic history presents an intriguing puzzle: how did supermassive black holes (SMBHs) grow so rapidly in such a short amount of cosmic time? In this talk, I will introduce new approaches to probing the early growth of SMBHs. First, I will present the first measurement of the clustering strength of luminous quasars and their surrounding galaxies at z>6 using recent observations from the James Webb Space Telescope. These measurements allow us to infer the properties of the quasars’ host dark matter halos and their duty cycles, offering new insight into the environments that foster SMBH growth. I will then highlight new results from deep spectroscopic observations of background galaxies behind a luminous high-redshift quasar, which allow us to tomographically map the quasar’s ionized bubble, constraining the obscured fraction of quasars, their emission geometry, and the timescales of SMBH growth.