Cafe-Club, Malgorzata SIUDEK (ICE, CSIC, Barcelona): “Supermassive black holes found in distant dwarf galaxies”

Malgorzata SIUDEK (Institut de Física d’Altes Energies, The Barcelona Institute of Science and Technology & Institute of Space Sciences (ICE, CSIC), Barcelona): “Supermassive black holes found in distant dwarf galaxies”.

You can find the schedule of upcoming café-clubs and the video of old ones here.

Take care,
Carlo, Meriam, Mathilde

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ABSTRACT

The statistical power of the VIPERS survey, which observed ~90,000 galaxies at intermediate redshifts (0.5 < z < 1), and the application of an unsupervised clustering algorithm, allowed us to distinguish between passive galaxies, star-forming galaxies and galaxies hosting active galactic nuclei (AGN), among other types. A follow-up study of their environmental dependence indicates that this classification may actually reflect different galaxy evolutionary paths revealing for instance a rare population of small and passive red galaxies or a population of AGN in dwarf galaxies. Among them, we found a sample of seven broad-line AGN in dwarf galaxies powered by supermassive black holes, more massive than expected from the scaling relations, contradicting standardly accepted models of synchronized growth. These black holes may originate from dwarf galaxies with intermediate-mass black holes in the early universe and over time will grow until their mass matches the one of the black hole they host. In my talk, I will discuss the implications of these findings for our understating of the growth of supermassive black holes.