The M•-σ Relation for Supermassive Black Holes

By D. Merritt, L. Ferrarese. 2000

394 citations recorded by the source corpus.

We investigate the differences in the M•-σ relation derived recently by Ferrarese & Merritt and by Gebhardt and collaborators. The shallower slope found by the latter authors (3.75 vs. 4.8) is due partly to the use of a regression algorithm that ignores measurement errors and partly to the value of the velocity dispersion adopted for a single galaxy, the Milky Way. A steeper relation is shown to provide a better fit to black hole masses derived from reverberation mapping studies. Combining the stellar dynamical, gasdynamical, and reverberation mapping mass estimates, we derive a best-fit relation M• = 1.30(±0.36) × 108 M☉(σc/200 km s-1)4.72(±0.36).

Subfields: Astronomy and Astrophysics

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/23034d8590da03e2de184cfa701bb0f73ac2ca36

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In Astronomy and Astrophysics

Citations in the corpus

Rates of stellar tidal disruption as probes of the supermassive black hole mass function (2014, methodology): “Our results are very insensitive to changes in the M•−σ relation; we have rerun the WM04 sample with both the Merritt & Ferrarese (2001) and the MM13 calibrations of this relation, and find that the mean change in individual rates ṄTDE is 15%.”
Modelling the galaxy bimodality: shutdown above a critical halo mass (2006, background): “…between black hole mass and bulge mass (Marconi & Hunt 2003; Häring & Rix 2004) or c© 2005 RAS, MNRAS 000, 1–17 the bulge’s velocity dispersion (Merritt & Ferrarese 2001; Tremaine et al. 2002), (b) the concordance between the quasar epoch and the stellar ages of early-type galaxies…”
On the black hole–bulge mass relation in active and inactive galaxies (2001, result): “However, in contrast, we find that the scatter around the Mbh –Lbulge relation for our sample of nearby inactive galaxies, which excludes non-E-type morphologies, is only 0.33 dex, in excellent agreement with the scatter around the Mbh –s relation (Merritt & Ferrarese 2001b).”
Low-Frequency Gravitational Waves from Massive Black Hole Binaries: Predictions for LISA and Pulsar Timing Arrays (2002, background): “Their masses, MBH, as determined from dynamical measurements (see, e.g., Merritt & Ferrarese 2001; Tremaine et al. 2002) or from reverberation mapping of active galactic nuclei (see, e.g., Ferrarese et al. 2001; Laor 2001), correlate tightly with the velocity dispersion, *, of their host stellar…”