Weighing a Quiescent Supermassive Black Hole with X-ray Emitting Gas

Details Weighing a Quiescent Supermassive Black Hole with X-ray Emitting Gas Weighing a Quiescent Supermassive Black Hole with X-ray Emitting Gas

Mar 2008

adsabs.harvard.edu/cgi-bin/nph-data_query?bibcode=2008head...10.3307h&link_type=abstract

American Astronomical Society, HEAD meeting #10, #33.07

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We report the first detection of a quiescent supermassive black hole (SMBH) by its gravitational influence on the hot ISM of its elliptical galaxy host. Chandra observations of NGC4649 reveal a temperature profile which, in common with other group-centred ellipticals, rises with radius in the outer parts of the galaxy, from 0.7 to 0.9 keV between 2 and 20 kpc. Inside the central 2 kpc, however, the trend reverses and the temperature peaks at 1.1 keV, at almost constant entropy, within the innermost 200pc. We demonstrate that, for gas which is close to hydrostatic, the central temperature peak arises due to the gravitational influence of the quiescent SMBH, confirming theoretical predictions of this effect. We constrained the SMBH mass, MBH, to 3.35+0.67-0.95× 109Msun at 90% confidence, in good agreement with stellar kinematics measurements. This makes NGC4649 one of only a handful of galaxies which have MBH measured by more than one method. This agreement is a crucial validation of both mass determination methods. Not only does it rule out pathological stellar orbital structure in the inner parts of the galaxy, it also clearly demonstrates the gas must be close to hydrostatic. This is further supported by its remarkably relaxed X-ray morphology, the agreement between the measured J-band stellar mass-to-light ratio (1.37±0.10 Msun/Lsun) and simple stellar population models for the galaxy, and the agreement between the mass profile inferred from the X-rays and from globular cluster kinematics at larger radii.

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