Morphological and Galatic Properties of Low-Mass Galaxies Hosting Variable Selected AGN

The population of Active Galactic Nuclei (AGN) in dwarf galaxies are elusive, and while galactic properties such as stellar mass have been shown to scale with black hole mass in more massive galaxies, it is unclear what galactic properties are linked to the presence of a black hole and if they continue to scale in the low mass regime. We present Hubble Space Telescope (HST) optical imaging of eight low mass galaxies hosting AGN candidates identified via their characteristic variability in Baldassare (2018). In a previous study, Messick (2023) studied the same eight galaxies with Chandra X-ray data and found evidence for AGN activity in three of the galaxies. In this study, we examine the morphology by decomposing each galaxy into a bulge and disk. Of the eight galaxies, six were successfully fit with pseudobulges and disks. We estimate the masses of the black holes by using the black hole to bulge mass scaling relation and find black hole masses of 10^(4.87-8.18) M. Additionally, of those six galaxies, five galaxies are fitted with a central point source and have luminosities consistent with nuclear star clusters. We compare this sample to other populations of dwarf galaxies hosting AGN candidates to better understand the galactic environments of low mass galaxies.