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The recent discovery of bright quasars around redshift z=6 suggests that black holes (BHs) with masses in excess of 10^9 Msun have already assembled at a very early stage in the evolution of the universe. An alternative interpretation is that these quasars are powered by less massive BHs, but their fluxes are strongly magnified through gravitational lensing by intervening galaxies. Here we analyze the flux distribution of the Ly alpha emission of the quasar with the highest known redshift, SDSS 1030+0524, at z=6.28. We show that this object could not have been magnified by lensing by more than a factor of five. The constraint arises from the large observed size, 30 (comoving) Mpc, of the ionized region around this quasar, and relies crucially only on the assumption that the quasar is embedded in a largely neutral IGM. Based on the line/continuum ratio of SDSS 1030+0524, we argue further that this quasar also cannot be beamed by a significant factor. We conclude that the minimum mass for its resident BH is 4 x 10^8 Msun (for magnification by a factor of five); if the mass is this low, then the quasars had to switch on prior to redshift z=9. From the size of the ionized region, we are also able to place an absolute lower bound on the age of this quasar at t > 2 x 10^7 years.
We present new VLT spectroscopic observations of the most distant quasar known, SDSS J1030+0524 at z=6.28 which was recently discovered by the Sloan Digital Sky Survey. We confirm the presence of a complete Gunn-Peterson trough caused by neutral hydr
We report on the spectroscopic confirmation of a large scale structure around the luminous, z=6.31 QSO SDSS~J1030+0524, that is powered by a billion solar mass black hole. The structure is populated by at least six members, four Lyman Break Galaxies
We have undertaken deep optical imaging observations of three 6.2<z<6.5 quasar fields in the i and z filters. These data are used to search for foreground galaxies which are gravitationally lensing the quasars and distant galaxies physically associat
Many distant objects can only be detected, or become more scientifically valuable, if they have been highly magnified by strong gravitational lensing. We use EAGLE and BAHAMAS, two recent cosmological hydrodynamical simulations, to predict the probab
We present a Bayesian framework to account for the magnification bias from both strong and weak gravitational lensing in estimates of high-redshift galaxy luminosity functions. We illustrate our method by estimating the $zsim8$ UV luminosity function