Powerful nuclear outflows and circumgalactic medium shocks driven by the most luminous quasar in the Universe

Understanding how gas flows into galaxies and how it is regulated by feedback from accreting black holes and star formation is critical to understanding the growth of galaxies [1–7]. The gas surrounding galaxies, or circumgalactic medium, encodes detailed information about these processes. It is extremely diffuse and historically has been studied in absorption along single sight lines to bright back- ground sources [8, 9]. Two-dimensional studies have been typically restricted to rest-frame UV emission lines, particularly hydrogen Ly-alpha fluorescence, around luminous accreting supermassive black holes, i.e., quasars. Understand- ing the dynamics and ionizing source using the Ly-alpha line alone is challenging [10–16]. Recently, the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) has provided the necessary surface brightness sensitivity to detect emission from optical recombi- nation lines of hydrogen and collisionally excited metal lines on circumgalactic medium scales in the early Universe, when star-formation and quasar activity were vastly more intense [17]. Coupled with its high angular resolution, JWST can detect emissions originating from interactions between powerful quasar-driven outflows and the surrounding gas [18]. Here, we report on JWST detection of rest-frame optical emission from hydrogen, oxygen, sulfur, and nitrogen in the circumgalactic gas around the most luminous infrared galaxy known, which is seen 1.3 billion years after the Big Bang and hosts a dusty quasar. We map the emission out to distances beyond the stellar light extent of the quasar host galaxy using a mosaic observing strategy that covers a significantly larger field of view than previous spectroscopic studies with JWST, which were limited to galactic scales [17]. We detect ionized gas filaments on 40 kpc scales connecting a network of merging galaxies in a forming galaxy cluster. We find regions of low ionization consistent with large-scale shock excitation out to distances nearly 8 times the effective stellar radius of the quasar host galaxy. In the nuclear region, we find an ionized outflow driven by the quasar with velocities reaching 13,000 kms−1, one of the fastest discovered to date. The outflow has sufficient energy to explain the kinetic energy due to the turbulent motion of the gas on galactic and circumgalactic scales. This provides compelling evidence supporting long- standing theoretical predictions that powerful quasar outflows are a main driver in regulating the heating and accretion rate of gas onto massive central galaxies.