A ∼50,000 M⊙ SOLAR MASS BLACK HOLE IN THE NUCLEUS OF RGG 118

By V. Baldassare, A. Reines, E. Gallo, Jenny E. Greene. 2015

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Scaling relations between black hole (BH) masses and their host galaxy properties have been studied extensively over the last two decades, and point toward co-evolution of central massive BHs and their hosts. However, these relations remain poorly constrained for BH masses below ∼ 10 6 ?> M ⊙ ?> . Here we present optical and X-ray observations of the dwarf galaxy RGG 118 taken with the Magellan Echellette Spectrograph on the 6.5 m Clay Telescope and Chandra X-ray Observatory. Based on Sloan Digital Sky Survey spectroscopy, RGG 118 was identified as possessing narrow emission line ratios indicative of photoionization partly due to an active galactic nucleus. Our higher resolution spectroscopy clearly reveals broad Hα emission in the spectrum of RGG 118. Using virial BH mass estimate techniques, we calculate a BH mass of ∼50,000 M ⊙ ?> . We detect a nuclear X-ray point source in RGG 118, suggesting a total accretion powered luminosity of L = 4 × 10 40 erg s − 1 ?> , and an Eddington fraction of ∼1%. The BH in RGG 118 is the smallest ever reported in a galaxy nucleus and we find that it lies on the extrapolation of the M BH − &sgr; * ?> relation to the lowest masses yet.

Subfields: Astronomy and Astrophysics, Nuclear and High Energy Physics

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/b1e578d09475ca44c84124b71a98057a6782a808

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Citations in the corpus

Titans of the early Universe: The Prato statement on the origin of the first supermassive black holes (2018, background): “The AGN nature of some of these sources has been reinforced by the detection of hard X-ray emission (Dong et al. 2012a; Baldassare et al. 2015, 2017).”
Observational evidence for intermediate-mass black holes (2017, background): “…MBH−Mbulge relation: the BH mass of IMBHs/low-mass AGN tends to be lower at a given bulge mass than expected from an extrapolation of the relation found for classical bulges (e.g., Greene et al. 2008; Jiang et al. 2011; Graham & Scott 2013, 2015; Baldassare et al. 2015, 2017; Nguyen et al. 2017).”
RELATIONS BETWEEN CENTRAL BLACK HOLE MASS AND TOTAL GALAXY STELLAR MASS IN THE LOCAL UNIVERSE (2015, background): “Follow-up high resolution spectroscopy of the Reines et al. (2013) sample has led to the discovery of a new broad-line object with MBH ∼ 50, 000 M⊙ (Baldassare et al. 2015).”
Active galactic nuclei: what’s in a name? (2017, background): “Indeed, X-ray emission has been detected from AGN with a broad range of MBH out to high redshifts (≈105–109 M ; e.g. Hickox et al. 2009; Page et al. 2014; Baldassare et al. 2015; Chen et al. 2017).”
Nuclear star clusters (2009, background): “Accretion observations have also revealed evidence for BHs below 105M (Baldassare et al. 2015; Chilingarian et al. 2018).”
Blossoms from black hole seeds: properties and early growth regulated by supernova feedback (2016, background): “The lowest mass central BH in a galaxy (ignoring “normal” stellar mass BHs) has a mass estimate of ∼ 50,000 M (Baldassare et al. 2015), and was identified as a low-luminosity AGN in the dwarf galaxy RGG 118 (Reines, Greene & Geha 2013; Graham, Ciambur & Soria c© 0000 RAS, MNRAS 000, 000–000 2016;…”