The Governors of the University of Calgary (DBA University of Calgary|Université de Calgary)
Do Massive Black Holes Come in Small Packages? A Census of Black Holes in Compact Stellar Systems in The Virgo Cluster — 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 ma