Measuring Black Hole Masses with the OSIRIS IFU Spectrograph at Keck

Details Measuring Black Hole Masses with the OSIRIS IFU Spectrograph at Keck Measuring Black Hole Masses with the OSIRIS IFU Spectrograph at Keck

Jan 2009

adsabs.harvard.edu/cgi-bin/nph-data_query?bibcode=2009aas...21343701m&link_type=abstract

American Astronomical Society, AAS Meeting #213, #437.01; Bulletin of the American Astronomical Society, Vol. 41, p.309

Physics

Optics

Scientific paper

We used laser guide star adaptive optics on the Keck II telescope to take high-resolution near-IR integral-field spectra of the region surrounding the supermassive black hole in the south nucleus of NGC 6240, a pair of colliding disk galaxies each with a black hole in its core. Our spectra allow us to use the K-band CO absorption bandheads to trace stellar kinematics. We obtain a spatial resolution of about 20 pc and thus we directly resolve the sphere of influence of the black hole. By mapping this region's stellar velocity field and comparing it to lower spatial resolution data from SINFONI on the VLT, we find that the mass of the southern black hole is high (of order 10^9 M_sun). The measured stellar velocity dispersion around this southern black hole (from SINFONI data) is only 220 km/sec. Using this velocity dispersion in the M-sigma relation would under-estimate the black hole mass. This is potentially important, as other work also suggests that in QSOs, black hole masses can be significantly larger than one would expect from the M-sigma relation (Dasyra et al. 2007 and Watson et al. 2008). We view this project as a proof-of-concept for the very high spatial resolution observations of supermassive black holes, now enabled by laser guide star adaptive optics. This work was supported in part by the National Science Foundation Science and Technology Center for Adaptive Optics, managed by the University of California at Santa Cruz under cooperative agreement No. AST-9876783.

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