M33: A Galaxy with No Supermassive Black Hole

By K. Gebhardt, Tod R. Lauer, J. Kormendy, J. Pinkney, G. Bower, R. Green, T. Gull, J. Hutchings, M. Kaiser, C. H. Nelson and 2 more. 2001

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Galaxies that contain bulges appear to contain central black holes whose masses correlate with the velocity dispersion of the bulge. We show that no corresponding relationship applies in the pure disk galaxy M33. Three-integral dynamical models fit Hubble Space Telescope WFPC2 photometry and Space Telescope Imaging Spectrograph spectroscopy best if the central black hole mass is zero. The upper limit is 1500 M⊙. This is significantly below the mass expected from the velocity dispersion of the nucleus and far below any mass predicted from the disk kinematics. Our results suggest that supermassive black holes are associated only with galaxy bulges and not with their disks.

Subfields: Astronomy and Astrophysics, Instrumentation

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/94ce99d951edd2ccc385fdea871e0300f176791b

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Citations in the corpus

THE NGC 404 NUCLEUS: STAR CLUSTER AND POSSIBLE INTERMEDIATE-MASS BLACK HOLE (2010, background): “However, the nearby galaxies M33 and NGC 205 have NSCs but no apparent central black hole (Gebhardt et al. 2001; Valluri et al. 2005), while some high mass core elliptical galaxies have MBHs but lack NSCs (Côté et al. 2006).”
The evolution of massive black hole seeds (2007, background): “The (possible) absence of a MBH in M33 hence arises naturally (Merritt, Ferrarese & Joseph 2001; Gebhardt et al. 2001) in our model.”
An Intermediate-Mass Black Hole in the Globular Cluster G1: Improved Significance from New Keck and Hubble Space Telescope Observations (2005, background): “M33’s nucleus has an upper limit of 1500M (Gebhardt et al. 2001).”
Supermassive black hole demography: the match between the local and accreted mass functions (2004, background): “The analysis of M33 by Gebhardt et al. (2001) yields an upper limit on the BH mass (∼1500 M ) more than 10 times below the central value predicted by equation (3).”
Formation of supermassive black holes (2010, background): “There are also significant non-detections of MBHs in a few nearby galaxies from stellardynamical observations, most notably the Local Group Scd-type spiral galaxy M33, in which the upper limit to MBH is just a few thousand solar masses (Gebhardt et al, 2001; Merritt et al, 2001).”
DWARF GALAXIES WITH OPTICAL SIGNATURES OF ACTIVE MASSIVE BLACK HOLES (2013, background): “A number of very late-type spiral galaxies have dynamical BH mass limits, including M33 with MBH . a few ×103 M (Gebhardt et al. 2001).”
Hubble Space Telescope STIS Spectra of Nuclear Star Clusters in Spiral Galaxies: Dependence of Age and Mass on Hubble Type (2006, background): “There are some galaxies with NCs that have BH mass upper limits (e.g., Böker et al. 1999; Gebhardt et al. 2001; Merritt et al. 2001).”
Massive black hole seeds from low angular momentum material (2003, background): “This would naturally explain why black hole mass is observed to correlate with spheroid mass and not disc mass (Gebhardt et al. 2001), since disc mass does not correlate well with the merger history in our picture.”
Cosmic Evolution of Black Holes and Spheroids. II. Scaling Relations at z = 0.36 (2007, background): “…and luminosity of the spheroidal (or bulge) component, indicating a connection between nuclear activity and galaxy formation and evolution (Magorrian et al. 1998; Ferrarese & Merritt 2000; Gebhardt et al. 2000, 2001; Marconi & Hunt 2003; Häring & Rix 2004; Novak et al. 2006; Graham & Driver 2007).”
The Mass Function of Active Black Holes in the Local Universe (2007, methodology): “Dynamical measurements in the Local Group for the late-type galaxy M33 (Gebhardt et al. 2001) and the dwarf spheroidal galaxy NGC 205 (Valluri et al. 2005) show that neither hosts a BH with a mass in accordance with expectations from the MBH − σ∗ relation.”
On the correlations between galaxy properties and supermassive black hole mass (2011, background): “The latter is a pure disc galaxy, which does not show any evidence of an SMBH (Gebhardt et al. 2001) but has a massive dark matter halo (Corbelli 2003).”
Dark matter and visible baryons in M33 (2003, background): “…(Persic, Salucci & Stel 1996; Corbelli & Salucci 2000, hereafter CS); (ii) it has no prominent black hole or bulge component in the centre (Gebhardt et al. 2001) and therefore it can be used to test if the innermost dark matter density profile is consistent with cosmological models which…”
A New Sample of Low-Mass Black Holes in Active Galaxies (2007, background): “Indeed, dynamical study of the bulgeless spiral galaxy M33 places strong limits on the presence of a dark central massive object (Gebhardt et al. 2001), while any BH in the nucleus of the dwarf spheroidal galaxy NGC 205 has been shown to lie below the low-mass extrapolation of theMBH − σ∗ relation…”