Infrared Spectral Energy Distribution and Variability of Active Galactic Nuclei: Clues to the Structure of Circumnuclear Material

The active galactic nucleus (AGN) phenomenon results from a supermassive black hole accreting its surrounding gaseous and dusty material. The infrared (IR) regime provides most of the information to characterize the dusty structures that bridge from the galaxy to the black hole, providing clues to the black hole growth and host galaxy evolution. Over the past several decades, with the commissioning of various ground, airborne and space IR observing facilities, our interpretations of the AGN circumnuclear structures have advanced significantly through an improved understanding of how their dust emission changes as a function of wavelength and how the heating of the dusty structures responds to variations in the energy released from the central engine. In this review, we summarize the current observational knowledge of the AGN IR broad-band spectral energy distributions (SEDs) and the IR time variability behavior covering large ranges of AGN luminosity and redshift, and discuss some first-order insights into the obscuring structures and host galaxy IR properties that can be obtained by integrating the relevant observations into a coherent picture.

A dusty compact object bridging galaxies and quasars at cosmic dawn

Understanding how super-massive black holes form and grow in the early Universe has become a major challenge^1,2 since it was discovered that luminous quasars existed only 700 million years after the Big Bang^3,4. Simulations indicate an evolutionary sequence of dust-reddened quasars emerging from heavily dust-obscured starbursts that then transition to unobscured luminous quasars by expelling gas and dust⁵. Although the last phase has been identified out to a redshift of 7.6 (ref. ⁶), a transitioning quasar has not been found at similar redshifts owing to their faintness at optical and near-infrared wavelengths. Here we report observations of an ultraviolet compact object, GNz7q, associated with a dust-enshrouded starburst at a redshift of 7.1899 ± 0.0005. The host galaxy is more luminous in dust emission than any other known object at this epoch, forming 1,600 solar masses of stars per year within a central radius of 480 parsec. A red point source in the far-ultraviolet is identified in deep, high-resolution imaging and slitless spectroscopy. GNz7q is extremely faint in X-rays, which indicates the emergence of a uniquely ultraviolet compact star-forming region or a Compton-thick super-Eddington black-hole accretion disk at the dusty starburst core. In the latter case, the observed properties are consistent with predictions from cosmological simulations⁷ and suggest that GNz7q is an antecedent to unobscured luminous quasars at later epochs.