A Supermassive Black Hole Mass Measurement in NGC 5102 with Schwarzschild Orbit-superposition Modeling
Abstract
We present a stellar-dynamical mass measurement of the central black hole in the lenticular galaxy NGC~5102 (SA0). Our analysis combines high-quality integral-field spectroscopy from the VLT Multi Unit Spectroscopic Explorer with high-spatial- and high-spectral-resolution Hubble Space Telescope Imaging Spectrograph observations, using the Ca II triplet as a stellar kinematic tracer. We constrain the black hole mass with axisymmetric, three-integral Schwarzschild orbit-superposition models, incorporating surface brightness measurements from HST F547M WFPC2 imaging. Assuming a distance of , we find a black hole mass of , which is within of a previous CO band-head-based Jeans Anisotropic Modeling result (). Our measurement is also consistent with literature extrapolations of the - relation into the currently under-sampled low-mass regime. The close agreement between these independent dynamical approaches provides external validation of the Jeans Anisotropic Modeling framework and supports the robustness of our Schwarzschild orbit-superposition result, bolstering confidence in future black hole mass measurements with this framework.
Keywords
Cite
@article{arxiv.2607.26186,
title = {A Supermassive Black Hole Mass Measurement in NGC 5102 with Schwarzschild Orbit-superposition Modeling},
author = {Thomas K. Waters and Kayhan Gultekin and Karl Gebhardt and Soch Foskic and Ahmad Kadri},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2607.26186},
year = {2026}
}
Comments
23 pages, 9 figures, accepted for publication in ApJ