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Black Hole

Lensing of space time around a black hole. At Oxford we study black holes observationally and theoretically on all size and time scales - it is some of our core work.

Credit: ALAIN RIAZUELO, IAP/UPMC/CNRS. CLICK HERE TO VIEW MORE IMAGES.

Michele Cappellari

Professor of Astrophysics

Research theme

  • Astronomy and astrophysics

Sub department

  • Astrophysics

Research groups

  • Galaxy formation and evolution
  • Extremely Large Telescope
michele.cappellari@physics.ox.ac.uk
Telephone: 01865 (2)73647
Denys Wilkinson Building, room 755
  • About
  • Publications

TDCOSMO XXIX: JWST/NIRSpec IFU Spatially Resolved Kinematics of Three Time-delay Lenses

(2026)

Authors:

Shawn Knabel, Pritom Mozumdar, Anowar J Shajib, Tommaso Treu, Devon M Williams, Michele Cappellari, David Law, Simon Birrer, Takahiro Morishita, William Sheu, Massimo Stiavelli

TDCOSMO XXVIII. The Hubble constant from the quadruply lensed quasar J1537$-$3010 with precise time delays

(2026)

Authors:

A Galan, AG Schweinfurth, SH Suyu, DP Johnson, A Chawla, D Sluse, GV Kharchilava, E Buckley-Geer, H Lin, S Knabel, W Sheu, S Ertl, T Anguita, S Birrer, F Courbin, F Dux, M Millon, V Motta, S Schuldt, T Treu, DM Williams, M Cappellari, KC Wong, D Eckert

TDCOSMO. XXVII. JWST-based Lens Models and H$_0$ Measurement of WFI2033, HE0435, and PG1115

(2026)

Authors:

DM Williams, T Treu, DP Johnson, P Mozumdar, S Knabel, S Birrer, CD Fassnacht, A Galan, AJ Shajib, KC Wong, M Cappellari, F Courbin, T Morishita, V Motta, D Sluse, M Stiavelli
More details from the publisher

Supermassive black holes in six triaxial galaxies: Insights from SINFONI and MUSE observations

Astronomy & Astrophysics EDP Sciences (2026)

Authors:

Sabine Thater, Avinash Chaturvedi, Davor Krajnović, Michele Cappellari, Sadegh Khochfar, Thorsten Naab, Marc Sarzi, Glenn van de Ven

Abstract:

Dynamical modelling can be used to constrain the masses of central black holes, but it is challenging to model massive galaxies because of their complex kinematics. We report six new measurements of supermassive black hole masses of massive early-type galaxies from stellar kinematics, which were extracted from adaptive-optics-assisted SINFONI and MUSE observations. We combined the stellar kinematics with HST photometry to build triaxial Schwarzschild orbit-superposition models. Our Schwarzschild models can recover the complex triaxial features of the galaxies and constrain the black hole masses of all six galaxies. We found that strong triaxial kinematic features can bias the mass measurements and corrected for this effect. The derived black hole masses are $(1.14^ DYNAMITE +0.41 _ -0.63 ) _ 10^9$ M_⊙ for NGC 3706, $(1.19^ +1.34 -0.80 ) _ 10^9$ M_⊙ for NGC 3923, $(1.14^ +1.08 -0.95 ) _ 10^9$ M_⊙ for NGC 4261, $(4.68^ +2.99 -4.26 ) _ 10^8$ M_⊙ for NGC 4636, $(3.51^ +3.37 -2.57 ) _ 10^9$ M_⊙ for IC 4296, and $(2.43^ +1.53 -1.65 ) 10^9$ M_⊙ for IC 4329 at a confidence level of 3σ. We compared our measurements with published results from axisymmetric Schwarzschild modelling and with our JAM Jeans Anisotropic models and obtained mostly consistent black hole masses. Most of our black hole mass estimates can be well constrained using MUSE observations alone. All of our mass measurements agree with local black hole scaling relations.
More details from the publisher

Supermassive black holes in six triaxial galaxies: Insights from SINFONI and MUSE observations

(2026)

Authors:

Sabine Thater, Avinash Chaturvedi, Davor Krajnovic, Michele Cappellari, Sadegh Khochfar, Thorsten Naab, Marc Sarzi, Glenn van de Ven
More details from the publisher

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