Gas-dynamical mass measurements of the supermassive black holes in the early-type galaxies NGC 4786 and NGC 5193 from ALMA and HST observations

Abstract

We present molecular gas-dynamical mass measurements of the central black holes in the giant elliptical galaxies NGC 4786 and NGC 5193, based on CO (2−1) observations from the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA) and Hubble Space Telescope near-infrared imaging. The central region in each galaxy contains a circumnuclear disk that exhibits orderly rotation with projected line-of-sight velocities of ∼270 km s−1. We build gas-dynamical models for the rotating disk in each galaxy and fit them directly to the ALMA data cubes. At 0.″31 resolution, the ALMA observations do not fully resolve the black hole sphere of influence (SOI), and neither galaxy exhibits a central rise in rotation speed, indicating that emission from deep within the SOI is not detected. As a result, our models do not tightly constrain the central black hole mass in either galaxy, but they prefer the presence of a central massive object in both galaxies. We measure the black hole mass to be ( M BH / 10 8 M ⊙ ) = 5.0 ± 0.2 [ 1 σ statistical ] − 1.3 + 1.4 [ systematic ] in NGC 4786 and ( M BH / 10 8 M ⊙ ) = 1.4 ± 0.03 [ 1 σ statistical ] − 0.1 + 1.5 [ systematic ] in NGC 5193. The largest component of each measurement’s error budget is from the systematic uncertainty associated with the extinction correction in the host galaxy models. This underscores the importance of assessing the impact of dust attenuation on the inferred M