Astronomy and Astrophysics – Astrophysics
Scientific paper
2007-05-12
Mon.Not.Roy.Astron.Soc.379:909-914,2007
Astronomy and Astrophysics
Astrophysics
7 pages, 7 figures. Accepted by MNRAS
Scientific paper
10.1111/j.1365-2966.2007.11949.x
The near-infrared integral field spectrograph SINFONI at the ESO VLT opens a new window for the study of central supermassive black holes. With a near-IR spatial resolution similar to HST optical and the ability to penetrate dust it provides the possibility to explore the low-mass end of the M-sigma relation (sigma<120km/s) where so far very few black hole masses were measured with stellar dynamics. With SINFONI we observed the central region of the low-luminosity elliptical galaxy NGC4486a at a spatial resolution of ~0.1arcsec in the K band. The stellar kinematics was measured with a maximum penalised likelihood method considering the region around the CO absorption band heads. We determined a black hole mass of M_BH=1.25^{+0.75}_{-0.79} x 10^7 M_sun (90% C.L.) using the Schwarzschild orbit superposition method including the full 2-dimensional spatial information. This mass agrees with the predictions of the M-sigma relation, strengthening its validity at the lower sigma end.
Bender Ralf
Davies Richard I.
Gebhardt Karl
Nowak Nina
Pannella Maurilio
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