Issue |
A&A
Volume 597, January 2017
|
|
---|---|---|
Article Number | A18 | |
Number of page(s) | 20 | |
Section | Extragalactic astronomy | |
DOI | https://doi.org/10.1051/0004-6361/201629480 | |
Published online | 19 December 2016 |
A low upper mass limit for the central black hole in the late-type galaxy NGC 4414⋆
1 Leibniz-Institute for Astrophysics Potsdam (AIP), An der Sternwarte 16, 14482 Potsdam, Germany
e-mail: sthater@aip.de
2 Institute of Astronomy and Kavli Institute for Cosmology, University of Cambridge, Madingley Road, Cambridge CB3 0HA, UK
3 Sub-Department of Astrophysics, University of Oxford, Denys Wilkinson Building, Keble Road, Oxford OX1 3RH, UK
4 ESO, Karl Schwarzschild Strasse 2, 85748 Garching b. München, Germany
5 Leiden Observatory, Leiden University, Niels Bohrweg 2, 2333 CA Leiden, The Netherlands
6 Department of Physics and Astronomy, Macquarie University, Sydney NSW 2109, Australia
7 Australian Astronomical Observatory, PO Box 915, Sydney NSW 1670, Australia
8 Centre for Astrophysics Research, University of Hertfordshire, College Lane, Hatfield AL10 9AB, UK
9 Max Planck Institute for Astronomy, Königstuhl 17, 69117 Heidelberg, Germany
Received: 4 August 2016
Accepted: 4 October 2016
We present our mass estimate of the central black hole in the isolated spiral galaxy NGC 4414. Using natural guide star adaptive optics assisted observations with the Gemini Near-Infrared Integral Field Spectrometer (NIFS) and the natural seeing Gemini Multi-Object Spectrographs-North (GMOS), we derived two-dimensional stellar kinematic maps of NGC 4414 covering the central 1.5 arcsec and 10 arcsec, respectively, at a NIFS spatial resolution of 0.13 arcsec. The kinematic maps reveal a regular rotation pattern and a central velocity dispersion dip down to around 105 km s-1. We constructed dynamical models using two different methods: Jeans anisotropic dynamical modeling and axisymmetric Schwarzschild modeling. Both modeling methods give consistent results, but we cannot constrain the lower mass limit and only measure an upper limit for the black hole mass of MBH = 1.56 × 106M⊙ (at 3σ level) which is at least 1σ below the recent MBH−σe relations. Further tests with dark matter, mass-to-light ratio variation and different light models confirm that our results are not dominated by uncertainties. The derived upper limit mass is not only below the MBH−σe relation, but is also five times lower than the lower limit black hole mass anticipated from the resolution limit of the sphere of influence. This proves that via high quality integral field data we are now able to push black hole measurements down to at least five times less than the resolution limit.
Key words: galaxies: individual: NGC 4414 / galaxies: spiral / galaxies: kinematics and dynamics
The reduced data cubes (FITS files) are only available at the CDS via anonymous ftp to cdsarc.u-strasbg.fr (130.79.128.5) or via http://cdsarc.u-strasbg.fr/viz-bin/qcat?J/A+A/597/A18
© ESO, 2016
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