THE M87 BLACK HOLE MASS FROM GAS-DYNAMICAL MODELS OF SPACE TELESCOPE IMAGING SPECTROGRAPH OBSERVATIONS

By Jonelle L. Walsh, A. Barth, Luis C. Ho, M. Sarzi. 2013

227 citations recorded by the source corpus.

The supermassive black hole of M87 is one of the most massive black holes known and has been the subject of several stellar and gas-dynamical mass measurements; however, the most recent revision to the stellar-dynamical black hole mass measurement is a factor of about two larger than the previous gas-dynamical determinations. Here, we apply comprehensive gas-dynamical models that include the propagation of emission-line profiles through the telescope and spectrograph optics to new Space Telescope Imaging Spectrograph observations from the Hubble Space Telescope. Unlike the previous gas-dynamical studies of M87, we map out the complete kinematic structure of the emission-line disk within ∼40 pc from the nucleus, and find that a small amount of velocity dispersion internal to the gas disk is required to match the observed line widths. We examine a scenario in which the intrinsic velocity dispersion provides dynamical support to the disk, and determine that the inferred black hole mass increases by only 6%. Incorporating this effect into the error budget, we ultimately measure a mass of (68% confidence). Our gas-dynamical black hole mass continues to differ from the most recent stellar-dynamical mass by a factor of two, underscoring the need for carrying out more cross-checks between the two main black hole mass measurement methods.

Subfields: Astronomy and Astrophysics

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/cabc35b16d2e7505aa61a46b96b8a23ad637a24c

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Citations in the corpus

Black hole shadows, photon rings, and lensing rings (2019, unknown): “5× 10M [17].”
Imaging the Schwarzschild-radius-scale Structure of M87 with the Event Horizon Telescope Using Sparse Modeling (2017, background): “…the mass of M87, which has an uncertainty of an factor of about two between the stellardynamical (e.g. Gebhardt et al. 2011) and gas-dynamical (e.g. Walsh et al. 2013) modeling, and therefore be informative to clarify that which of modeling methods is desirable to measure the mass of super-massive…”
PHOTON RINGS AROUND KERR AND KERR-LIKE BLACK HOLES (2013, background): “The uncertainty of the mass of the supermassive black hole at the center of M87 is currently reported to be ≈ 29% assuming no uncertainty in the distance (see Gültekin et al. 2009 and references therein; see, however, Walsh et al. 2013).”
The Structure and Dynamics of the Subparsec Jet in M87 Based on 50 VLBA Observations over 17 Years at 43 GHz (2018, background): “…Nakamura 2012), and Very Large Array (VLA) observations at 15 GHz indicate a FWHM apparent opening angle of Θapp ≈ 6.5◦ from HST-1 to knot A located at 1 The M87 black hole mass is still controversial, with results from gas dynamics giving masses of about half that given above (Walsh et al. 2013).”
General relativistic magnetohydrodynamical simulations of the jet in M 87 (2015, methodology): “Based on the stellar or gas dynamics in the core, the mass of the M87 central BH has been estimated as MBH = 3.2, 3.5, and 6.2 × 109M⊙ (by Macchetto et al. 1997; Gebhardt et al. 2011; Walsh et al. 2013, respectively).”
Silhouette of M87*: A new window to peek into the world of hidden dimensions (2019, background): “3×10M [69], are based on stellar dynamics and gas dynamics studies, respectively.”
Kinematics of the jet in M 87 on scales of 100–1000 Schwarzschild radii (2016, background): “Analysis of multi-epoch observations has yielded detections of 1 The black hole mass estimates reported in the literature for M 87 are typically in the range of ∼3–7 billion solar masses (cf. Walsh et al. 2013, and references therein).”
The shape of the black hole photon ring: A precise test of strong-field general relativity (2020, unknown): “56 [36].”
CO-EVOLUTION OF GALACTIC NUCLEI AND GLOBULAR CLUSTER SYSTEMS (2013, background): “However, the discrepancy is less with the black-hole mass based on gas-dynamical measurements (Walsh et al. 2013): Mbh,M87 = (3.5+0.9−0.7)×109M⊙.”
Testing the nature of Gauss–Bonnet gravity by four-dimensional rotating black hole shadow (2020, unknown): “3 × 10 M [107], respectively.”
Testing the rotational nature of the supermassive object M87* from the circularity and size of its first image (2019, background): “[12] J.”