Probing Obscured Massive Black Hole Accretion and Growth since Cosmic Dawn

Abstract

Most of the stars today reside in galactic spheroids, whose properties are tightly tied to the supermassive black holes (MBHs) at their centers, implying that the accretion activity onto MBHs leaves a lasting imprint on the evolution of their host galaxies. Despite the importance of this so-called MBH-galaxy co-evolution, the physical mechanisms responsible for driving this relationship - such as the dominant mode of energetic feedback from active galactic nuclei (AGN) - remain a poorly understand aspect of galaxy assembly. A key challenge for identifying and characterizing AGN during the peak epoch of galaxy assembly and beyond is the presence of large columns of gas and dust, which fuels the growth of their MBHs but effectively obscures them from view in optical and X-ray studies. The high sensitivity of the ngVLA will capture emission from AGN in an extinction-free manner out to z ∼ 6 and beyond. At lower-redshifts (z ∼ 2), the high angular resolution of the ngVLA will enable spatially-resolved studies capable of localizing the sites of actively growing MBHs within their host galaxies during the peak epoch of cosmic assembly.