Related papers: Active Galaxies and the Study of Black Hole Demogr…
Recent years have seen tremendous progress in the quest to detect supermassive black holes in the centers of nearby galaxies, and gas-dynamical measurements of the central masses of active galaxies have been valuable contributions to the…
In this contributed paper I review our current knowledge of the local Black Hole (BH) scaling relations, and their impact on the determination of the local BH mass function. I particularly emphasize the remaining systematic uncertainties…
A brief overview of the methods commonly used to determine or estimate the black hole mass in quiescent or active galaxies is presented and it is argued that the use of mass-scaling relations is both a reliable and the preferred method to…
The scaling relations between supermassive black holes and their host galaxy properties are of fundamental importance in the context black hole-host galaxy co-evolution throughout cosmic time. In this work, we use a novel algorithm that…
In the past decade, much effort was devoted to measure the masses of supermassive black holes in galactic nuclei, to establish the relation between black hole mass and the global/nuclear properties of the host galaxy, and to understand the…
Black holes (BHs) play a major role in the structural and dynamical evolutions of Globular Clusters (GCs). Several recent works searched for BHs in Galactic GCs using scaling relations derived from numerical simulations. However, the…
With references to both key and oft-forgotten pioneering works, this article starts by presenting a review into how we came to believe in the existence of massive black holes at the centres of galaxies. It then presents the historical…
We review the current state of dynamical modeling for galaxies in terms of being able to measure both the central black hole mass and stellar orbital structure. Both of these must be known adequately to measure either property. The current…
This article discusses stellar dynamical evidence for supermassive black holes in inactive and weakly active galaxies.
A variety of observational approaches have provided evidence for extended halos of dark matter surrounding elliptical galaxies, and for massive dark objects in (some of) their nuclei. What are the properties of the dark halos? How do they…
Masses of black holes in nearby galactic nuclei can be measured in a variety of ways, using stellar and gaseous kinematics. Reliable black hole masses are known for several dozen objects, so that demographic questions can start to be…
In this small review we present the actual state the knowledge about weighting black holes. Black holes can be found in stellar binary systems in our Galaxy and in other nearby galaxies, in globular clusters, which we can see in our and…
The black hole mass function of supermassive black holes describes the evolution of the distribution of black hole mass. It is one of the primary empirical tools available for mapping the growth of supermassive black holes and for…
The article summarizes the observational evidence for the existence of massive black holes, as well as the current knowledge about their abundance, their mass and spin distributions, and their cosmic evolution within and together with their…
Supermassive black holes are located at the center of most, if not all, massive galaxies. They follow close correlations with global properties of their host galaxies (scaling relations), and are thought to play a crucial role in galaxy…
I review the status of observational determinations of central masses in nearby galactic nuclei. Results from a variety of techniques are summarized, including ground-based and space-based optical spectroscopy, radio VLBI measurements of…
We present evidence that there is a significant correlation between the fraction of a galaxy's mass that lies in its central black hole and the age of the galaxy's stellar population. Since the absorption line indices that are used to…
We review the likely population, observational properties, and broad implications of stellar-mass black holes and ultraluminous x-ray sources. We focus on the clear empirical rules connecting accretion and outflow that have been established…
Our knowledge of supermassive black holes (SMBHs) and their relation to their host galaxies is still limited, and there are only around 150 SMBHs that have their masses directly measured and confirmed. Better black hole mass scaling…
In our recent paper (Salucci et al. 1998) we have investigated the mass distribution function of massive dark objects in galaxies, exploiting the available optical and radio observations. Under the assumption that massive black holes power…