English

A Supermassive Black Hole Mass Measurement in NGC 5102 with Schwarzschild Orbit-superposition Modeling

Astrophysics of Galaxies 2026-07-28 v1

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 3.66Mpc3.66\,\mathrm{Mpc}, we find a black hole mass of (1.300.18+0.19)×106M(1.30^{+0.19}_{-0.18})\times10^6\,\mathrm{M_{\scriptscriptstyle\odot}}, which is within 1.7σ1.7\sigma of a previous CO band-head-based Jeans Anisotropic Modeling result (M=(9.11.5+1.8)×105MM_{\bullet}=(9.1^{+1.8}_{-1.5})\times10^5\,\mathrm{M_{\scriptscriptstyle\odot}}). Our measurement is also consistent with literature extrapolations of the MM_{\bullet}-σe\sigma_e 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