MEASUREMENT OF THE BLACK HOLE MASS IN NGC 1332 FROM ALMA OBSERVATIONS AT 0.044 ARCSECOND RESOLUTION Academic Article uri icon

abstract

  • 2016. The American Astronomical Society. All rights reserved. We present Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA) Cycle 3 observations of CO(2-1) emission from the circumnuclear disk in the E/S0 galaxy NGC 1332 at 0.044 resolution. The disk exhibits regular rotational kinematics and central high-velocity emission (500 km s -1 ) consistent with the presence of a compact central mass. We construct models for a thin, dynamically cold disk in the gravitational potential of the host galaxy and black hole and fit the beam-smeared model line profiles directly to the ALMA data cube. Model fits successfully reproduce the disk kinematics out to r = 200 pc. Fitting models just to spatial pixels within projected r = 50 pc of the nucleus (two times larger than the black hole's gravitational radius of influence), we find M BH =(6.64 +0.65-0.63 ) 10 8 M o . This observation demonstrates ALMA's powerful capability to determine the masses of supermassive black holes by resolving gas kinematics on small angular scales in galaxy nuclei.

published proceedings

  • ASTROPHYSICAL JOURNAL LETTERS

altmetric score

  • 443.008

author list (cited authors)

  • Barth, A. J., Boizelle, B. D., Darling, J., Baker, A. J., Buote, D. A., Ho, L. C., & Walsh, J. L.

citation count

  • 39

complete list of authors

  • Barth, Aaron J||Boizelle, Benjamin D||Darling, Jeremy||Baker, Andrew J||Buote, David A||Ho, Luis C||Walsh, Jonelle L

publication date

  • January 2016