The Masses of Nuclear Black Holes in Luminous Elliptical Galaxies and Implications for the Space Density of the Most Massive Black Holes

By Tod R. Lauer, S. Faber, D. Richstone, K. Gebhardt, S. Tremaine, M. Postman, A. Dressler, M. Aller, A. Filippenko, R. Green and 4 more. 2006

358 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Black hole (BH) masses predicted from the M•-σ relationship conflict with predictions from the M•-L relationship for high-luminosity galaxies, such as brightest cluster galaxies (BCGs). The M•-L relationship predicts that some BCGs may harbor BHs with M• approaching 1010 M☉, while the M•-σ relationship always predicts M• < 3 × 109 M☉. We argue that the M•-L relationship is a plausible description for galaxies of high luminosity. If the cores in central stellar density are formed by binary BHs, the inner core cusp radius, rγ, may be an independent witness of M•. Using central structural parameters derived from a large sample of early-type galaxies observed by HST, we argue that L is superior to σ as an indicator of rγ. Further, the rγ-M• relationship for 11 core galaxies with measured M• appears to be consistent with the M•-L relationship for BCGs. BCGs have large cores appropriate for their large luminosities that may be difficult to generate with the more modest BH masses inferred from the M•-σ relationship. M• ~ M would be expected for BCGs, if they were formed in dissipationless mergers, which should preserve the ratio of BH to stellar mass, M. This scenario appears to be consistent with the slow increase in σ with L and the more rapid increase in effective radii with L seen in BCGs as compared to less luminous galaxies. If BCGs have large BHs commensurate with their luminosities, then the local BH mass function for M• > 3 × 109 M☉ would be nearly an order of magnitude richer than that inferred from the M•-σ relationship. The volume density of the most luminous QSOs may favor the M•-L relationship.

Subfields: Astronomy and Astrophysics, Instrumentation

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/72d461a3da80ac8dea593a8655f19c16dc61ebcf

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Citations in the corpus

Coevolution (Or Not) of Supermassive Black Holes and Host Galaxies (2013, neutral): “18 NGC 5576: This is a core elliptical (Lauer et al. 2007) with a BH detection and M• measurement in Gültekin et al. (2009b).”
How Mergers May Affect the Mass Scaling Relation between Gravitationally Bound Systems (2007, background): “If the quasar host galaxy studies are correct and are not significantly affected by biases pointed out by Lauer et al. (2007), then some other physics not considered here is responsible for causing a decline in the normalization of Γ with time (e.g. see Croton 2006; Hopkins et al. 2007; Fontanot et…”
AGN heating and ICM cooling in the HIFLUGCS sample of galaxy clusters (2008, background): “…the outerenvelopes of the cD galaxies, which may be more pronounced in the V- or B-band, especially if the outer-envelope light represents on-going star-formation, and which might not have anything to do with the central galaxy dynamics (however, see Lauer et al. 2007, for a difference of opinion).”
Discriminating Between the Physical Processes that Drive Spheroid Size Evolution (2009, methodology): “…most massive, first-toassemble high-redshift systems) appear to lie significantly above the Shen et al. (2003) size–mass relation for more recently assembled field galaxies (see e.g. Batcheldor et al. 2007; Bernardi et al. 2007; Lauer et al. 2007c; von der Linden et al. 2007; Kormendy et al. 2009).”
REVISITING THE SCALING RELATIONS OF BLACK HOLE MASSES AND HOST GALAXY PROPERTIES (2012, background): “…et al. (2007a). f The literature contains two inconsistent estimates of the V -band bulge luminosity of NGC 4564: MV = −19.60 in G09, and MV = −20.26 in Lauer et al. (2007a). g Bulge luminosities for NGC 4736 and NGC 4826 were included in the sample of McConnell et al. (2011a) and their fit to the…”
Galactic accretion and the outer structure of galaxies in the CDM model (2013, background): “…from SDSS photometric measurements miss a substantial fraction of light in the outer regions of massive galaxies with high Sèrsic index (Graham et al. 2005; Bernardi et al. 2007; Lauer et al. 2007; Blanton et al. 2011; Bernardi et al. 2012; Meert et al. 2012; Mosleh, Williams & Franx 2013).”
Black Hole Spin and Galactic Morphology (2007, background): “Cores, in turn, are preferentially reside in giant ellipticals (see Lauer et al. 2007 and references therein).”
On the correlations between galaxy properties and supermassive black hole mass (2011, methodology): “…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 & Mancini 2009), and the stellar light and mass deficit associated with the core ellipticals (Lauer et al. 2007; Kormendy & Bender 2009).”
Rates of stellar tidal disruption as probes of the supermassive black hole mass function (2014, methodology): “We find that the HST photometry of Lauer et al. (2007) is able to resolve rcrit for a large majority of galaxies in our sample, including almost every galaxy with M• > 107M .”
Radiative efficiency, variability and Bondi accretion on to massive black holes: the transition from radio AGN to quasars in brightest cluster galaxies (2012, background): “Lauer et al. (2007) suggest that the apparent magnitudes from 2MASS are not deep enough to capture the extent of the BCG envelope and therefore will underestimate the total luminosity and black holemass.”
Ongoing assembly of massive galaxies by major merging in large groups and clusters from the SDSS (2007, background): “Another possibility is that the CEN-SAT masses are much more disparate as a result of the standard SDSS photometry systematically underestimating the CEN luminosities (Lauer et al. 2007).”
Black Holes in Pseudobulges and Spheroidals: A Change in the Black Hole-Bulge Scaling Relations at Low Mass (2008, background): “The projections are defined by a very clean sample of elliptical and spheroidal galaxies in the Virgo Cluster, representing the most careful andmodern photometric measurements available from the recent study of Kormendy et al. (2008).”
SELF-CONSISTENT MODELS OF THE AGN AND BLACK HOLE POPULATIONS: DUTY CYCLES, ACCRETION RATES, AND THE MEAN RADIATIVE EFFICIENCY (2007, background): “However, a more recent analysis by Lauer et al. (2007a) and Tundo et al. (2007) argues that these two methods do not provide the same answer.”
Physical properties and environments of nearby galaxies (2009, background): “The ellipticals with cores are the most luminous galaxies, with MV − 5 log10 h < −21, and correspondingly have distinctly higher global Sérsic indices, boxier isophotes, slower rotation, and more triaxiality (Ferrarese et al. 2006; Lauer et al. 2007a; Kormendy et al. 2009).”
DISSIPATION AND EXTRA LIGHT IN GALACTIC NUCLEI. II. “CUSP” ELLIPTICALS (2008, methodology): “Although the composite profiles were used in Lauer et al. (2007a) to estimate effective radii, they were not actually shown in the paper.”
CONSTRAINTS ON BLACK HOLE GROWTH, QUASAR LIFETIMES, AND EDDINGTON RATIO DISTRIBUTIONS FROM THE SDSS BROAD-LINE QUASAR BLACK HOLE MASS FUNCTION (2010, background): “However, we note that the local number density of the most massive SMBHs is poorly constrained and subject to considerable systematic uncertainty (Lauer et al. 2007), and therefore the duty cycle of BLQSOs with MBH ∼ 1010 M may be subject to considerable systematic error.”
Biases in Virial Black Hole Masses: An SDSS Perspective (2007, methodology): “This Malmquist-type bias is important in analyses that are based on “observed” BH masses, such as the active BH mass function (e.g., McLure & Dunlop 2004) and the redshiftevolution of theM − σ relation (Lauer et al. 2007).”
A semi-analytic model for the co-evolution of galaxies, black holes and active galactic nuclei (2008, background): “…may be underestimated by a significant factor (as much as 1.5 mag) in surveys such as SDSS and Two Micron All Sky Survey (2MASS) (Desroches et al. 2007; Lauer et al. 2007; von der Linden et al. 2007), upon which our local galaxy stellar mass function and luminosity function estimates are based.”
The Spitzer/IRAC view of black hole–bulge scaling relations (2010, background): “Optical observations in the V-band (Lauer et al. 2007, G09) produce slightly higher values for α and β.”