AGN and Supermassive Black Holes with MSE

Abstract

Most bulge-dominated galaxies host black holes with masses that tightly correlate with the masses of their bulges. This may indicate that the black holes may regulate galaxy growth (or vice versa), or that they grow in lock-step. The quest to understand how, when, and where those black-holes formed motivates much of modern extragalactic astronomy. In this presentation, we focus on a population of galaxies with active black holes in their nuclei (active galactic nuclei or AGN) that are fully or partially hidden by dust and gas. The emission from the broad-line region is either partially or completely obscured by a visual extinction greater than 1. This limit appears to be the point at which the populations of AGN may evolve differently. We highlight the importance of finding and studying those dusty AGN at redshifts between 1 and 3, the epoch when the universe may have gone through its most dramatic changes. The Maunakea Spectroscopic Explorer (MSE) s a large aperture, highly multiplexed spectroscopic ground-based facility that will perform dedicated surveys in the optical and NIR to pin down the demographics of such objects and study their reddening properties, star-formation histories, and excitation conditions. These key studies will shed light on the role of black holes in galaxy evolution during the epoch of peak growth activity.