We present a sample of accreting supermassive black holes (SMBHs) in dwarf galaxies at z<1. We identify dwarf galaxies in the NEWFIRM Medium Band Survey with stellar masses M⋆<3×109M⊙ that have spectroscopic redshifts from the DEEP2 survey and lie within the region covered by deep (flux limit of ∼5×10−17−6×10−16ergcm−2s−1) archival Chandra X-ray data. From our sample of 605 dwarf galaxies, 10 exhibit X-ray emission consistent with that arising from AGN activity. If black hole mass scales roughly with stellar mass, then we expect that these AGN are powered by SMBHs with masses of ∼105−106M⊙ and typical Eddington ratios ∼5%. Furthermore, we find an AGN fraction consistent with extrapolations of other searches of ∼0.6−3% for 109M⊙≤M⋆≤3×109M⊙ and 0.1<z<0.6. Our AGN fraction is in good agreement with a semi-analytic model, suggesting that as we search larger volumes we may use comparisons between observed AGN fractions and models to understand seeding mechanisms in the early universe.
@article{arxiv.1603.01622,
title = {X-ray Detected Active Galactic Nuclei in Dwarf Galaxies at $0<z<1$},
author = {Kris Pardo and Andy D. Goulding and Jenny E. Greene and Rachel S. Somerville and Elena Gallo and Ryan C. Hickox and Brendan P. Miller and Amy E. Reines and John D. Silverman},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1603.01622},
year = {2018}
}
Comments
15 pages, 9 figures, Accepted by ApJ; v3: author information updated