The Governors of the University of Calgary

Published purpose

Following the JWST ERS and Cycle 1 GO Announcement of Opportunity published on June 14, 2021, the CSA is providing funding via a Grant Agreement to the university to conduct their research using the JWST data. The project will be about… The black hole (BH) mass function in the local universe—a fundamental measure of the origin and growth of BHs over Cosmic time—remains poorly constrained at intermediate masses. The very existence of BHs in this mass range is debated, but likely hosts include low-mass dwarf galaxies, for which the occupation fraction of BHs is an important ingredient for competing theories on supermassive BH (SMBH) formation. The launch of JWST enables a systematic census of BHs in compact stellar systems (CSSs), as similar studies are prohibitively expensive using current facilities. We have been awarded 41.2 hours of JWST Cycle 1 GO time to use NIRSpec/IFU to obtain spatially-resolved stellar kinematics of 18 carefully selected CSSs crossing nearly four decades in mass, and located in a single cluster environment. The R~2700 spectral datacubes will reveal dynamical fingerprints of BHs with masses lower than ever detected before, providing new insights into the occupation fraction of BHs in low-mass systems, and critical information on the origin of both CSSs and SMBHs.