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

http://arxiv.org/abs/1911.11491


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 $(2.89\pm 2.05) \times 10^8M_{\odot}$ from stellar kinematics and $(1.35\pm 0.09) \times 10^8M_{\odot}$ from molecular gas kinematics which are consistent within their $3\sigma$ uncertainties. Compared to recent M${\rm BH}$ – $\sigma{\rm e}$ 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.

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S. Thater, D. Krajnović, D. Nguyen, et. al.
Wed, 27 Nov 19
53/59

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