Program: GN-2020A-Q-215

Supermassive black holes (BHs) live at the heart of almost all massive galaxies and power the most luminous quasars at the edge of the observable Universe. However, the origin of these monster BHs is far from understood and directly observing the first “seed” BHs at high redshift is not feasible with current telescopes. Present-day dwarf galaxies, on the other hand, are within observational reach and offer another avenue to learn about the birth and growth of BH seeds. We have recently discovered a set of compact radio sources in nearby dwarf galaxies with luminosities indicative of accreting massive BHs. However most of these radio sources are not in the centers of the galaxies, and can have offsets as large as 4.2 arcseconds (~2 kpc). If verified, this surprising result would confirm predictions from simulations that massive BHs need not always reside in the nuclei of dwarf galaxies, and have important consequences for constraining BH seed formation using dwarf galaxies. We propose to use the GMOS-N IFU to observe 10 of these newly identified radio sources to confirm their AGN nature using optical diagnostics and rule out potential background quasars.