Paper detail

Gravitational lenses magnify up to one third of the most distant quasars

Exceptionally bright quasars with redshifts up to z=6.28 have recently been discovered. Quasars are thought to be powered by the accretion of gas onto supermassive black holes at the centres of galaxies. Their maximum (Eddington) luminosity is proportional to the mass of the black hole, and so these bright quasars are inferred to have black holes with masses of more than a few billion solar masses. The existence of such massive black holes poses a challenge to models for the formation of structures in the early Universe, as it requires that the black holes would grow so massive in less than a billion years after the Big Bang. Here we show that up to a third of known quasars with z~6 will have their observed flux magnified by a factor of 10 or more through gravitational lensing by galaxies along the line of sight. The inferred abundance of quasar host galaxies, as well as the luminosity density provided by the quasars, are therefore substantially overestimated.