Speaker
Description
Supermassive black holes (SMBHs) reside in the heart of virtually every massive galaxy. However, much less is known about whether dwarf galaxies commonly host SMBHs.
Exploiting the recently published eROSITA X-ray catalogue, we built a sample of actively accreting SMBHs in local dwarf galaxies. This uniformly selected sample of 74 AGN is, to date, one of the largest compilations of X-ray-selected SMBHs hosted by dwarf galaxies.
I will present the sample-building procedure we adopted and the properties of the sources we selected. I will also discuss how, by comparing our sample with semianalytical models, it is possible to extract precious information about the growth history of SMBHs which could help constrain different seeding mechanisms of the most mysterious building blocks of our Universe.
