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JWST Reveals a Candidate Supermassive Black Hole Binary at z = 4.3 in the Brightest Submillimeter Galaxy in COSMOS-Web

  • Authors: Jed McKinney, Ansh Gupta, Julian B. Muñoz, John Chisholm, Caitlin M. Casey, Stephanie M. Urbano Stawinski, Olivia Cooper, Erini Lambrides, Hollis Akins, Maximilien Franco, Archana Aravindan, Seiji Fujimoto, Kohei Inayoshi, Andreas L. Faisst, Jeyhan S. Kartaltepe, Michael Boylan-Kolchin

Jed McKinney et al 2026 The Astrophysical Journal Letters 1011 .

  • Provider: AAS Journals

Caption: Figure 9.

Velocity offsets (∣Δv∣) and broad-component FWHM from rest-frame optical emission lines. Outflows at low redshift (black squares; C. M. Harrison et al. 2012; N. L. Zakamska et al. 2016) and high redshift (gray diamonds; J. Yang et al. 2023; S. Carniani et al. 2024; Y. Xu et al. 2025; W. Liu et al. 2026) are typically measured from [O III]. Binary-SMBH candidates at z < 0.7 (blue pentagons; M. Eracleous et al. 2012) are inferred from Hβ. AzTEC-1’s broad Hα (red) and broad [S II] (orange) are shown with contours spanning the 16th, 50th, and 84th percentiles of all models considered with an offset broad component. The measured velocities exceed the escape velocity of AzTEC-1’s galaxy (1010.5 M⊙ at 1 kpc, dashed) and dark-matter halo (1012 M⊙ at 10 kpc, dotted) above which the maximum gas velocity (∣Δv∣ + 0.5 × FWHM) would be unbound. All other outflows with ∣Δv∣ and FWHM exceeding 1000 km s−1 are extended over 2–15 kpc (C. M. Harrison et al. 2012). AzTEC-1’s broad Hα kinematics overlap the most extreme outflows in luminous z ≈ 5–6 quasars and SMBH-binary candidates selected from SDSS.

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