A Fundamental Relation between Compact Stellar Nuclei, Supermassive Black Holes, and Their Host Galaxies

By L. Ferrarese, P. Côté, E. Dalla Bontà, E. Peng, David Merritt, Andrés Jordán, J. Blakeslee, Monica Haşegan, S. Mei, S. Piatek and 2 more. 2006

294 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Imaging surveys with the Hubble Space Telescope (HST) have shown that ≈50%-80% of low- and intermediate-luminosity galaxies contain a compact stellar nucleus at their center, regardless of host galaxy morphological type. We combine HST imaging for early-type galaxies from the ACS Virgo Cluster Survey with ground-based long-slit spectra from KPNO to show that the masses of compact stellar nuclei in Virgo Cluster galaxies obey a tight correlation with the masses of the host galaxies. The same correlation is obeyed by the supermassive black holes (SBHs) found in predominantly massive galaxies. The compact stellar nuclei in the Local Group galaxies M33 and NGC 205 are also found to fall along this same scaling relation. These results indicate that a generic by-product of galaxy formation is the creation of a central massive object (CMO)—either an SBH or a compact stellar nucleus—that contains a mean fraction, ≈0.2%, of the total galactic mass. In galaxies with masses greater than ℳgal ~ a few × 1010 ℳ☉, SBHs appear to be the dominant mode of CMO formation.

Subfields: Astronomy and Astrophysics, Electrical and Electronic Engineering, Instrumentation

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Citations in the corpus

Quantifying the coexistence of massive black holes and dense nuclear star clusters (2009, methodology): “Curiously, the continuous relations shown by Wehner & Harris (2006) and Ferrarese et al. (2006a) involving either the BH or NC mass and the host galaxy mass are suggestive of, at some level, mutually c 0000 RAS common physics governing the two types of nuclei.”
Fundamental Planes and the Barless MBH-σ Relation for Supermassive Black Holes (2008, background): “Consequences for the MNC-σ (and MNC-L) relation involving nuclear star clusters (e.g., Ferrarese et al. 2006; Balcells et al. 2007) are also deferred for elsewhere.”
THE NGC 404 NUCLEUS: STAR CLUSTER AND POSSIBLE INTERMEDIATE-MASS BLACK HOLE (2010, background): “Using the Ferrarese et al. (2006) NSC mass vs. σ relation also gives a mass nearly an order of magnitude smaller than the measured NSC mass.”
Multiwavelength Study of Massive Galaxies at z ~ 2. II. Widespread Compton-thick Active Galactic Nuclei and the Concurrent Growth of Black Holes and Bulges (2007, background): “…tight correlations have now been unveiled between central supermassive BH and the mass or velocity dispersion of the bulge in their host galaxies (Ferrarese & Merritt 2000; Gebhardt et al. 2000), with typical mass ratioMBH/Mbulge∼ (1–2)× 10−3 (e.g., McLure & Dunlop 2001; Ferrarese et al 2006).”
How Mergers May Affect the Mass Scaling Relation between Gravitationally Bound Systems (2007, background): “1010M⊙, the central object with which galaxies correlate may be either intermediate mass BHs in dwarf galaxies (Filippenko & Ho 2003; Barth et al. 2004, 2005; Greene & Ho 2006) or central massive star clusters (Ferrarese et al. 2006; Graham & Driver 2007).”
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).”
Radio transients from stellar tidal disruption by massive black holes (2011, background): “106M⊙) in galactic nuclei is unclear (e.g. Ferrarese et al. 2006; Greene & Ho 2007) and, even if they are abundant, their electromagnetic emission will be dim if it is limited to a fraction of the Eddington luminosityLEdd ∝ MBH.”
The ACS Virgo Cluster Survey. XIII. SBF Distance Catalog and the Three-dimensional Structure of the Virgo Cluster (2007, background): “…early-type galaxies (Peng et al. 2006b = Paper XI) and the connection between supermassive black holes and central stellar nuclei in early-type galaxies (Ferrarese et al. 2006b), and the luminosity functions and color–magnitude relations for globular clusters in early-type galaxies (Jordan et al.…”
THE NEXT GENERATION VIRGO CLUSTER SURVEY (NGVS). I. INTRODUCTION TO THE SURVEY (2012, methodology): “In the NGVS, it will therefore be possible to extend the study of nuclei (e.g., frequency of nucleation, luminosity functions, mass fractions, CMRs, etc.) to galaxies hundreds of times fainter than the lowest-luminosity galaxies in the ACSVCS, and to explore possible dependencies of nuclear properti”
On the correlations between galaxy properties and supermassive black hole mass (2011, methodology): “…1998; Häring & Rix 2004), the central light concentration (Graham et al. 2001), the Sérsic index (Graham & Driver 2007), the virial mass of the galaxy (Ferrarese et al. 2006), the gravitational binding energy (Aller & Richstone 2007), the kinetic energy of random motions of the bulge (Feoli &…”
A Log-Quadratic Relation for Predicting Supermassive Black Hole Masses from the Host Bulge Sérsic Index (2006, background): “Due to the association of SMBHs with their host bulge, rather than the host galaxy, we have excluded the lenticular galaxies9 because Ferrarese et al. (2006a) modeled the combined bulge + disk light with a 9 Inclusion of the lenticular galaxies increases the scatter but does not suggest any shift…”
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).”
The ATLAS3D project – I. A volume-limited sample of 260 nearby early-type galaxies: science goals and selection criteria (2010, background): “…isophote shape (disky or boxy) (Bender et al. 1989; Kormendy & Bender 1996), (iii) the inner slope of their photometric profiles: cored/cuspy (Ferrarese et al. 1994; Lauer et al. 1995; Faber et al. 1997) or excess/deficit of core light (Graham 2004; Ferrarese et al. 2006; Kormendy et al. 2009).”
THE ACS VIRGO CLUSTER SURVEY XVI. SELECTION PROCEDURE AND CATALOGS OF GLOBULAR CLUSTER CANDIDATES (2008, background): “…magnitudes and distances (Mei et al. 2005ab, 2007), the morphology, isophotal parameters and surface brightness profiles for early-type galaxies (Ferrarese et al. 2006a), the connection between GCs and ultracompact dwarf galaxies (Haşegan et al. 2005), the nuclei of early-type galaxies…”
Massive black hole binary mergers within subparsec scale gas discs (2008, background): “…evidence – of which the most compelling is probably the small observed scatter in the relationships between black hole mass and galaxy properties (Ferrarese et al., 2006; Gebhardt et al., 2000) – suggests that binaries do merge, though these arguments do c© 2008 RAS not constrain the time…”
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 Coincidence of Nuclear Star Clusters and Active Galactic Nuclei (2008, methodology): “…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.”
Formation of supermassive black holes (2010, background): “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…”