Are there more galaxies than we see around high-$z$ quasars?

TL;DR

This study uses Monte Carlo simulations to analyze ALMA observations of high-redshift quasars, revealing that observational biases can explain discrepancies and supporting the idea that these quasars reside in massive dark-matter halos.

Contribution

It provides a statistical framework accounting for telescope biases to interpret quasar companion galaxy detections, aligning observations with theoretical halo mass predictions.

Findings

Telescope geometry significantly influences detection rates.

Current data suggest quasars are in halos with mass > 10^{12} solar masses.

Each quasar has about 2 companion galaxies within 1 Mpc.

Abstract

Whether or not $z \gtrsim 6$ quasars lie in the most massive dark-matter halos of the Universe is still a subject of dispute. While most theoretical studies support this scenario, current observations yield discordant results when they probe the halo mass through the detection rate of quasar companion galaxies. Feedback processes from supermassive black holes and dust obscuration have been blamed for this discrepancy, but the impact of these effects is complex and far from being clearly understood. This paper aims to improve the interpretation of current far-infrared observations by taking into account the cosmological volume probed by the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array Telescope and to explain the observational discrepancies. We statistically investigate the detection rate of quasar companions in current observations and verify if they match the expected distribution from various theoretical models, once convolved with the ALMA field-of-view, through the use of Monte Carlo simulations. We demonstrate that the telescope geometrical bias is fundamental and can alone explain the scatter in the number of detected satellite galaxies in different observations. We conclude that the resulting companion densities depend on the chosen galaxy distributions. According to our fiducial models, current data favour a density scenario where quasars lie in dark-matter halos of viral mass $M_{\rm vir} \gtrsim 10^{12}~{\rm M_{\odot}}$, in agreement with most theoretical studies. According to our analysis, each quasar has about 2 companion galaxies, with a [CII] luminosity $L_{\rm [CII]} \gtrsim 10^8~{\rm L}_{\odot}$, within a distance of about 1~Mpc from the quasar.