Speaker: Mar Mezcua (Institute of Space Sciences, Barcelona)
Title: The seeds of the first supermassive black holes
Abstract:
Supermassive black holes of 10^10 solar masses already existed at z~6-7, when the Universe was less than 1 Gyr old. To reach this mass in such a short time they should have started as seed intermediate-mass black holes (IMBHs) of 100-10^6 solar masses at z > 8.
I will show that a population of actively accreting IMBHs exists in local dwarf galaxies and that they can be detected out to z~3 with the use of deep multiwavelength surveys. Whether these are the relics of those early seed black holes that did not grow into supermassive is still a matter of debate, since processes such as dwarf galaxy mergers and black hole feedback can have a very strong impact on black hole growth. The next generation of observational facilities such as the SKA could open a new window by detecting seed IMBHs at birth.