Hengyue Zhang

Abstract:

We present a measurement of the supermassive black hole (SMBH) mass of the nearby lenticular galaxy NGC 383, based on Atacama Large Millimeter/sub-millimeter Array (ALMA) observations of the ¹²CO(2-1) emission line with an angular resolution of 0.″050×0.″024 (≈16×8 pc²). These observations spatially resolve the nuclear molecular gas disc down to ≈41,300 Schwarzschild radii and the SMBH sphere of influence by a factor of ≈24 radially, better than any other SMBH mass measurement using molecular gas to date. The high resolution enables us to probe material with a maximum circular velocity of ≈1040 km/s^-1, even higher than those of the highest-resolution SMBH mass measurements using megamasers. We detect a clear Keplerian increase (from the outside in) of the line-of-sight rotation velocities, a slight offset between the gas disc kinematic (i.e. the position of the SMBH) and morphological (i.e. the centre of the molecular gas emission) centres, an asymmetry of the innermost rotation velocity peaks and evidence for a mild position angle warp and/or non-circular motions within the central ≈0.″3 arcsec. By forward modelling the mass distribution and ALMA data cube, we infer a SMBH mass of (3.58±0.19)×10⁹ M⊙ (1σ confidence interval), more precise (5%) but consistent within ≈1.4σ with the previous measurement using lower-resolution molecular gas data. Our measurement emphasises the importance of high spatial resolution observations for precise SMBH mass determinations.

Abstract:

The mass (MBH) of a supermassive black hole (SMBH) can be measured using spatially-resolved kinematics of the region where the SMBH dominates gravitationally. The most reliable measurements are those that resolve the smallest physical scales around the SMBHs. We consider here three metrics to compare the physical scales probed by kinematic tracers dominated by rotation: the radius of the innermost detected kinematic tracer Rmin normalised by respectively the SMBH’s Schwarzschild radius (RSchw ≡ 2GMBH/c2, where G is the gravitational constant and c the speed of light), sphere-of-influence (SOI) radius ($R_\mathrm{SOI}\equiv GM_\mathrm{BH}/\sigma _\mathrm{e}^2$, where σe is the stellar velocity dispersion within the galaxy’s effective radius) and equality radius (the radius Req at which the SMBH mass equals the enclosed stellar mass, MBH = M*(Req), where M*(R) is the stellar mass enclosed within the radius R). All metrics lead to analogous simple relations between Rmin and the highest circular velocity probed Vc. Adopting these metrics to compare the SMBH mass measurements using molecular gas kinematics to those using megamaser kinematics, we demonstrate that the best molecular gas measurements resolve material that is physically closer to the SMBHs in terms of RSchw but is slightly farther in terms of RSOI and Req. However, molecular gas observations of nearby galaxies using the most extended configurations of the Atacama Large Millimeter/sub-millimeter Array can resolve the SOI comparably well and thus enable SMBH mass measurements as precise as the best megamaser measurements.

Abstract:

Abstract Recent work revealed the existence of a galaxy ‘millimetre fundamental plane of black hole accretion’, a tight correlation between nuclear 1 mm luminosity, intrinsic 2 – 10 keV X-ray luminosity and supermassive black hole mass, originally discovered for nearby low- and high-luminosity active galactic nuclei. Here we use mm and X-ray data of 5 X-ray binaries (XRBs) to demonstrate that these stellar-mass black holes also lie on the mm fundamental plane, as they do at radio wavelengths. One source for which we have multi-epoch observations shows evidence of deviations from the plane after a state change, suggesting that the plane only applies to XRBs in the hard state, as is true again at radio wavelengths. We show that both advection-dominated accretion flows and compact jet models predict the existence of the plane across the entire range of black hole masses, although these models vary in their ability to accurately predict the XRB black hole masses.