Gamma-Ray Blazars within the First 2 Billion Years

The detection of high-redshift (z > 3) blazars enables the study of the evolution of the most luminous relativistic jets over cosmic time. More importantly, high-redshift blazars tend to host massive black holes and can be used to constrain the space density of heavy black holes in the early universe. Here, we report the first detection with the Fermi-Large Area Telescope of five γ-ray-emitting blazars beyond z = 3.1, more distant than any blazars previously detected in γ-rays. Among these five objects, NVSS J151002+570243 is now the most distant known γ-ray-emitting blazar at z = 4.31. These objects have steeply falling γ-ray spectral energy distributions (SEDs), and those that have been observed in X-rays have a very hard X-ray spectrum, both typical of powerful blazars. Their Compton dominance (ratio of the inverse Compton to synchrotron peak luminosities) is also very large (>20). All of these properties place these objects among the most extreme members of the blazar population. Their optical spectra and the modeling of their optical-UV SEDs confirm that these objects harbor massive black holes (M_BH ∼ 10 ^8-10 M_o ). We find that, at z ≈ 4, the space density of >10⁹ M_o black holes hosted in radio-loud and radio-quiet active galactic nuclei are similar, implying that radio-loudness may play a key role in rapid black hole growth in the early universe.