A hidden population of active galactic nuclei can explain the overabundance of luminous $z>10$ objects observed by JWST

Understand

The first wave of observations with JWST has revealed a striking overabundance of luminous galaxies at early times ($z>10$) compared to models of galaxies calibrated to pre-JWST data.

• Early observations have also uncovered a large population of supermassive black holes (SMBHs) at $z>6$.
• Because many of the high-$z$ objects appear extended, the contribution of active galactic nuclei (AGNs) to the total luminosity has been assumed to be negligible.
• In this work, we use a semi-empirical model for assigning AGNs to galaxies to show that active galaxies can boost the stellar luminosity function (LF) enough to solve the overabundance problem while simultaneously remaining consistent with the observed morphologies of high-$z$ sources.