2024ApJ...961..178C

One of the primary outstanding questions in extragalactic astronomy is the formation and early evolution of the supermassive black holes that are seen in nearly every massive galaxy. Low-metallicity dwarf galaxies may offer the most representative local analogs to pristine early galaxies, making them a vital tool in probing black hole seed models through the study of the intermediate-mass black holes (IMBHs) possibly hosted therein; though these dwarf galaxies, and the IMBHs they may host, are typically not as well-studied in this context as their higher-metallicity and higher-mass counterparts. In this paper, we explore the X-ray properties of a sample of 37 low-metallicity dwarf galaxies using archival XMM observations, and we compare the properties of this population against a representative sample of higher-metallicity counterparts. We report the detection of 10 sources with 0.3-10 keV luminosity in excess of 10⁴⁰ erg s^–1 within the low-metallicity sample, which we highlight for followup as potential IMBH candidates. Finally, we discuss the differing multiwavelength scaling relations (e.g., L_X-L_W2, L_X-star formation rate) between the two galaxy populations, as well as the sample's L_X as a function of metallicity.