English

Testing the robustness of black hole mass measurements with ALMA and MUSE

Astrophysics of Galaxies 2020-01-08 v1

Abstract

We present our ongoing work of using two independent tracers to estimate the supermassive black hole mass in the nearby early-type galaxy NGC 6958; namely integrated stellar and molecular gas kinematics. We used data from the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA), and the adaptive-optics assisted Multi-Unit Spectroscopic Explorer (MUSE) and constructed state-of-the-art dynamical models. The different methods provide black hole masses of (2.89±2.05)×108M(2.89\pm 2.05) \times 10^8M_{\odot} from stellar kinematics and (1.35±0.09)×108M(1.35\pm 0.09) \times 10^8M_{\odot} from molecular gas kinematics which are consistent within their 3σ3\sigma uncertainties. Compared to recent MBH_{\rm BH} - σe\sigma_{\rm e} scaling relations, we derive a slightly over-massive black hole. Our results also confirm previous findings that gas-based methods tend to provide lower black hole masses than stellar-based methods. More black hole mass measurements and an extensive analysis of the method-dependent systematics are needed in the future to understand this noticeable discrepancy.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.1911.11491,
  title  = {Testing the robustness of black hole mass measurements with ALMA and MUSE},
  author = {Sabine Thater and Davor Krajnović and Dieu D. Nguyen and Satoru Iguchi and Peter M. Weilbacher},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1911.11491},
  year   = {2020}
}

Comments

5 pages, 3 figures, Proceeding of IAU Symposium 353, Galactic Dynamics in the Era of Large Surveys, ed. M. Valluri & J. A. Sellwood, Cambridge Univ. Press, in press; submitted September, 2019