A Fundamental Relation between Supermassive Black Holes and Their Host Galaxies

By L. Ferrarese, D. Merritt. 2000

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The masses of supermassive black holes correlate almost perfectly with the velocity dispersions of their host bulges, Mbh ∝ σα, where α = 4.8 ± 0.5. The relation is much tighter than the relation between Mbh and bulge luminosity, with a scatter no larger than expected on the basis of measurement error alone. Black hole masses recently estimated by Magorrian et al. lie systematically above the Mbh-σ relation defined by more accurate mass estimates, some by as much as 2 orders of magnitude. The tightness of the Mbh-σ relation implies a strong link between black hole formation and the properties of the stellar bulge.

Subfields: Astronomy and Astrophysics

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/e5839836d01cb3f6ba3087ed4784844d47416706

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Citations in the corpus

CANDELS: THE COSMIC ASSEMBLY NEAR-INFRARED DEEP EXTRAGALACTIC LEGACY SURVEY (2011, neutral): “The discovery of the remarkably tight relation between black hole masses and host spheroid properties (Magorrian et al. 1998; Gebhardt et al. 2000; Ferrarese & Merritt 2000; Häring & Rix 2004) has given birth to a new paradigm: the co-evolution of galaxies and their central supermassive black…”
Accreting supermassive black holes in the COSMOS field and the connection to their host galaxies (2012, background): “…and the various properties of their host galaxies, such as luminosity (Kormendy & Richstone 1995; McLure & Dunlop 2001; Marconi & Hunt 2003), stellar mass (Magorrian et al. 1998) and velocity dispersion (Ferrarese & Merritt 2000; Gebhardt et al. 2000; Tremaine et al. 2002; Kormendy & Bender 2011).”
Nuclear Activity in Nearby Galaxies (2008, background): “…correlates strongly with the properties of the host galaxy (Kormendy 1993; Kormendy & Richstone 1995; Magorrian et al. 1998; Gebhardt et al. 2000; Ferrarese & Merritt 2000; Barth, Greene & Ho 2005; Greene & Ho 2006) has generated intense interest in linking BH growth with galaxy formation, as…”
Cosmic Evolution of Black Holes and Spheroids. III. The MBH-σ* Relation in the Last Six Billion Years (2008, background): “Understanding the origin of the black hole mass - spheroid velocity dispersion (MBH-σ∗) relation (Ferrarese & Merritt 2000; Gebhardt et al. 2000) is a key goal of unified models of black hole – galaxy coevolution (e.g. Kauffmann & Haenhelt 2000; di Matteo et al. 2005; Ciotti & Ostriker 2007).”
The Blast Wave Model for AGN Feedback: Effects on AGN Obscuration (2008, background): “…that the accretion episodes are fundamentally related to galaxy growth; one such indication is provided by the narrow scatter in the observed correlation of the SMBHmassMBH, with host galaxy massM, when the former is in the range 107 MBH/M 109 (Ferrarese & Merritt 2000; Gebhardt et al. 2000).”
The abundance and clustering of dark haloes in the standard ΛCDM cosmogony (2002, background): “Such galaxies are indeed now thought to host the ∼ 109 M⊙ black holes which must have powered these distant quasars (Gebhardt et al 2000; Ferrarese & Merritt 2000).”
Cosmological simulations of black hole growth: AGN luminosities and downsizing (2013, background): “In addition, strong correlations are found between black hole (BH) masses and properties of their host E-mail: mhirsch@oats.inaf.it galaxies (Ferrarese & Merritt 2000; Gebhardt et al. 2000; Tremaine et al. 2002; Häring & Rix 2004; Graham & Driver 2007; Gültekin et al. 2009; Burkert & Tremaine…”
What drives the growth of black holes (2011, background): “…the hostgalaxy luminosities or velocity dispersions and the local BH–spheroid mass relationships; e.g., Magorrian et al. 1998; Gebhardt et al. 2000; Ferrarese & Merritt 2000; Tremaine et al. 2002; Marconi et al. 2004), the BHs of z ≈ 0.3–1.5 X-ray AGNs appear to be massive and are growing more…”
A ∼50,000 M⊙ SOLAR MASS BLACK HOLE IN THE NUCLEUS OF RGG 118 (2015, background): “Dynamical mass measurements for low-mass BHs are limited by the resolving power of our telescopes; even with the Hubble Space Telescope, we can only resolve the sphere of influence of BHs with MBH ∼ 105 M for the Local Group.”
Cosmic evolution of quasar clustering: implications for the host haloes (2004, background): “The mass of the central black hole seems to correlate with the luminosity and the velocity dispersion of the spheroidal stellar component (e.g. Magorrian et al. 1998; Ferrarese & Merritt 2000; Gebhardt et al. 2000; Tremaine et al. 2002).”
Tracing the cosmic growth of supermassive black holes to z ∼ 3 with Herschel (2014, background): “…between the BH mass and other physical properties of its host: galaxy bulge stellar mass, luminosity, velocity dispersion (Magorrian et al. 1998; Ferrarese & Merritt 2000; Gebhardt et al. 2000; Tremaine et al. 2002; Marconi & Hunt 2003; Gültekin et al. 2009) and dark matter halo mass (Ferrarese…”
Red mergers and the assembly of massive elliptical galaxies: the fundamental plane and its projections (2006, background): “If correct, black hole masses for very luminous galaxies based on the canonical MBH–σ e relation (Ferrarese & Merritt 2000; Gebhardt et al. 2000; Tremaine et al. 2002) would systematically underpredict the true black hole mass (see also Lauer et al., in preparation).”
Observations of feedback from radio-quiet quasars – II. Kinematics of ionized gas nebulae (2013, background): “One such observation is the tight correlation between black hole masses and the velocity dispersions and masses of their host bulges (Ferrarese & Merritt 2000; Gebhardt et al. 2000; Tremaine et al. 2002; Marconi & Hunt 2003; Häring & Rix 2004; Gültekin et al. 2009; McConnell et al. 2011).”
Hubble Space Telescope Evidence for an Intermediate-Mass Black Hole in the Globular Cluster M15. II. Kinematic Analysis and Dynamical Modeling (2002, background): “For these black holes there is a strong correlation between the black hole mass and the velocity dispersion of the bulge component (Gebhardt et al. 2000b; Ferrarese & Merritt 2000).”
Supermassive black holes and their feedback effects in the IllustrisTNG simulation (2017, background): “The relatively tight scaling relations between supermassive black hole masses and properties of their host galaxies (e.g. Ferrarese & Merritt 2000) furthermore point towards a mutual influence on each other, thereby establishing some form of co-evolution.”
A primer on hierarchical galaxy formation: the semi-analytical approach (2006, background): “Motivated by the observed correlation between black hole mass and bulge mass (Magorrian et al. 1998; Ferrarese & Merritt 2000; Gebhardt et al. 2000), Kauffmann & Haehnelt tied the formation of black holes to the same process, galaxy mergers, which is responsible for building spheroids and bulges.”