Astronomy and Astrophysics – Astronomy
Scientific paper
Dec 2000
adsabs.harvard.edu/cgi-bin/nph-data_query?bibcode=2000aas...19713409s&link_type=abstract
American Astronomical Society, 197th AAS Meeting, #134.09; Bulletin of the American Astronomical Society, Vol. 33, p.720
Astronomy and Astrophysics
Astronomy
Scientific paper
We present gas kinematics at parsec-scale resolution for the nuclear regions of four nearby early-type disk galaxies and model them as rotation of a gas disk in the joint potential of the stellar bulge and a putative central black hole. The data were selected from a larger set of long-slit spectra obtained with the STIS spectrograph on HST as part of the Survey of Nearby Nuclei with STIS (SUNNS). This subset of objects met the prerequisite of displaying a rotation curve symmetric and consistent with a rotating disk. We infer the disk orientation from the dust lane morphology at similar radii and constrain the black hole mass M by matching the gas rotation curve. For three of the four objects, the data clearly require a central black hole, with masses ranging from 107 to 108 Msun and consistent with the predictions of the correlation between M and central stellar velocity dispersion σ . Despite the impressive recent progress, the demography of supermassive black holes (SMBHs) is far from complete. Ther majority of the reported SMBHs are in ellipticals and early-type disk galaxies, and it is not clear if the M-σ relation holds also for disk-dominated galaxies. The SUNNS sample, spanning a wide range of Hubble types, offer the opportunity to check for systematic deviations from the M-σ relation. For 16 of the SUNNS sample galaxies, we could estimate stringent upper-limits for M, using the forbidden [NII] and [SII] emission line widths measured within a 0".15 x 0".20 aperture, and assuming the gas either on circular motions or in hydrostatic equilibrium.
Filippenko Alexei V.
Ho Luis C.
McIntosh Daniel H.
Rix Hans-Walter
Rudnick Gregory
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