NO EVIDENCE OF OBSCURED, ACCRETING BLACK HOLES IN MOST z=6 STAR-FORMING GALAXIES

It has been claimed that there is a large population of obscured, accreting black holes at high redshift and that the integrated black hole density at z = 6 as inferred from X-ray observations is similar to 100 times greater than that inferred from optical quasars. I have performed a stacking analysis of very deep Chandra X-ray data at the positions of photometrically selected z = 6 galaxy candidates. It is found that there is no evidence for a stacked X-ray signal in either the soft (0.5-2 keV) or hard (2-8 keV) X-ray bands. Previous work which reported a significant signal is affected by an incorrect method of background subtraction which underestimates the true background within the target aperture. The puzzle remains as to why the z = 6 black hole mass function has such a flat slope and a low normalization compared to the stellar mass function.