From Supermassive Black Holes to Dwarf Elliptical Nuclei: A Mass Continuum

By E. Wehner, W. Harris. 2006

142 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Considerable evidence suggests that supermassive black holes reside at the centers of massive galactic bulges. At a lower galactic mass range, many dwarf galaxies contain extremely compact nuclei that structurally resemble massive globular clusters. We show that both these types of central massive objects (CMOs) define a single unbroken relation between CMO mass and the luminosity of their host galaxy spheroid. Equivalently, MCMO is directly proportional to the host spheroid mass over 4 orders of magnitude. We therefore suggest that the dE,N nuclei may be the low-mass analogs of supermassive black holes and that these two types of CMOs may have both developed starting from similar initial formation processes. The overlap mass interval between the two types of CMOs is small and suggests that for MCMO > 107 M☉, the formation of a black hole was strongly favored, perhaps because the initial gas infall to the center was too rapid and violent for star formation to occur efficiently.

Subfields: Astronomy and Astrophysics, Instrumentation

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/07350ece2169ae941760874befadc292c727b929

How researchers see this paper

The researchers whose trusted networks rank it highest, strongest advocate first. Every researcher gets a different order.

In Astronomy and Astrophysics

In Instrumentation

Citations in the corpus

Formation of supermassive black holes (2010, unknown): “Côté et al (2006), Wehner and Harris (2006) and Ferrarese et al (2006) find that, below M∗ ∼ 1010 M , Virgo spheroidals exhibit nuclear star clusters, whose mass scales with M∗ in the same fashion as those of the massive black holes detected in brighter galaxies (Magorrian et al, 1998; Marconi…”
The Mass Function of Active Black Holes in the Local Universe (2007, background): “…POX 52 may show evidence of nucleation fromHST observations (C. J. Thornton et al., in preparation), but inge - eral it is not possible to predict nuclear cluster luminosity from galaxy luminosity (although the two may be correlated; Ferrarese et al. 2006; Rossa et al. 2006; Wehner & Harris 2006).”
Masses and scaling relations for nuclear star clusters, and their co-existence with central black holes (2016, unknown): “Similar scaling relations are also found to hold between the mass of NSCs and their host galaxy bulge luminosity, mass (e.g. Ferrarese et al. 2006a; Wehner & Harris 2006) as well as morphological type (e.g. Rossa et al. 2006; Erwin & Gadotti 2012).”
A Log-Quadratic Relation for Predicting Supermassive Black Hole Masses from the Host Bulge Sérsic Index (2006, result): “Similar results using host bulge mass, rather than Sérsic index, have recently been reported in Côté et al. (2006), Ferrarese et al. (2006b), Rossa et al. (2006), and Wehner & Harris (2006).”
Nuclear star clusters (2009, methodology): “While it was at one point claimed that the NSC and BH scaling relations may be comparable (Ferrarese et al. 2006a; Wehner and Harris 2006), it has since become clear that the NSC scaling relations are distinct from the BH scaling relations (Leigh et al. 2012; Erwin and Gadotti 2012; Scott and…”
Quantifying the coexistence of massive black holes and dense nuclear star clusters (2009, background): “Wehner & Harris (2006) wrote that " dE,N nuclei themselves [the nuclear star clusters] show no evidence of harbouring massive black holes " .”
THE NGC 404 NUCLEUS: STAR CLUSTER AND POSSIBLE INTERMEDIATE-MASS BLACK HOLE (2010, background): “More recently, Ferrarese et al. (2006), Wehner & Harris (2006), and Rossa et al. (2006) have presented evidence that NSCs scale with bulge mass and dispersion in elliptical and early-type spiral galaxies in almost exactly the same way as MBHs.”
Doing Science with eLISA: Astrophysics and Cosmology in the Millihertz Regime (2012, background): “…et al., 2011a,b, Kuo et al., 2011, Xiao et al., 2011) and evidence exists that some of these low mass black holes of M 105 M cohabit nuclear star clusters (Barth et al., 2009, Bekki and Graham, 2010, Ferrarese et al., 2006, Graham and Spitler, 2009, Seth et al., 2008, Wehner and Harris, 2006).”
DISSIPATIONLESS FORMATION AND EVOLUTION OF THE MILKY WAY NUCLEAR STAR CLUSTER (2011, background): “The study of NSCs has raised considerable interest because of the fairly strong correlations between their masses and the properties (mass, velocity dispersion) of their host galaxies (Ferrarese et al. 2006; Wehner & Harris 2006).”
The evolution of massive black hole seeds (2007, background): “Ferrarese et al. (2006); Wehner & Harris (2006) suggest that below a transition galaxy mass (≃ 1010 M⊙) a central massive black hole seems to be replaced by a nuclear star cluster.”
THE NUCLEUS OF THE SAGITTARIUS DSPH GALAXY AND M54: A WINDOW ON THE PROCESS OF GALAXY NUCLEATION (2008, background): “• Stellar galactic nuclei are found to obey the same scaling relation that links Supermassive Black Holes (SBH) with their host galaxies (Wehner & Harris 2006, C06, FC06).”
A Fundamental Relation between Compact Stellar Nuclei, Supermassive Black Holes, and Their Host Galaxies (2006, methodology): “Constraining the slope of the MCMO-Mgal relation to be unity leads to a constant ratio between CMO and galaxy mass MCMO/Mgal ≈ 0.18% (with a ±1σ range of 0.06–0.52%), a conclusion also reached, based on photometric data only, by Côté et al. (2006) and Wehner & Harris (2006).”
STRUCTURE AND FORMATION OF ELLIPTICAL AND SPHEROIDAL GALAXIES (2008, background): “These authors plot BH and nuclear mass against galaxy absolute magnitude and find a single, continuous correlation (Côté et al. 2006; Wehner & Harris 2006; Ferrarese et al. 2006b; Graham & Driver 2006).”
THE NEXT GENERATION VIRGO CLUSTER SURVEY (NGVS). I. INTRODUCTION TO THE SURVEY (2012, background): “…connection of the nuclei to SMBHs is suggested by the discovery that stellar nuclei in low-mass galaxies make up roughly the same fraction of galaxy (baryonic) mass, η ∼ 0.2%, as the SMBHs in massive galaxies (Côté et al. 2006; Ferrarese et al. 2006b; Wehner & Harris 2006; Rossa et al. 2006).”
An expanded Mbh–σ diagram, and a new calibration of active galactic nuclei masses (2010, background): “Nuclear star clusters (Ferrarese et al. 2006; Wehner & Harris 2006) are now known to co-exist with SMBHs at the centres of lowand intermediate-mass spheroids (Filippenko & Ho 2003; Graham & Driver 2007a; González Delgado et al. 2008; Seth et al. 2008; Graham & Spitler 2009).”
The nuclear star cluster of the Milky Way: proper motions and mass (2009, background): “Recent research suggests that there exists a fundamental relation between NSCs, supermassive black holes, and their host galaxies (Wehner & Harris 2006; Ferrarese et al. 2006; Balcells et al. 2007; Seth et al. 2008b), similar to the relations between bulge luminosity, mass, or velocity dispersion…”
The Coincidence of Nuclear Star Clusters and Active Galactic Nuclei (2008, background): “…NC and galaxy luminosities or masses have been shown for samples of galaxies of a single type (Carollo et al. 1998; Böker et al. 2004; Côté et al. 2006; Rossa et al. 2006; Ferrarese et al. 2006; Wehner & Harris 2006), this is the first time they have been compared across all Hubble types.”