paper

The Supermassive Black Hole and Dark Matter Halo of NGC 4649 (M60)

arXiv:0910.4168 · doi:10.1088/0004-637X/711/1/484

Abstract

We apply the axisymmetric orbit superposition modeling to estimate the mass of the supermassive black hole and dark matter halo profile of NGC 4649. We have included data sets from the Hubble Space Telescope, stellar, and globular cluster observations. Our modeling gives the black hole mass = 4.5 \pm 1.0 10^9 \Msun and M/L = 8.7 \pm 1.0 (or 8.0 \pm 0.9 after foreground Galactic extinction is corrected). We confirm the presence of a dark matter halo, but the stellar mass dominates inside the effective radius. The parameters of the dark halo are less constrained due to the sparse globular cluster data at large radii. We find that in NGC 4649 the dynamical mass profile from our modeling is consistently larger than that derived from the X-ray data over most of the radial range by roughly 60% to 80%. It implies that either some forms of non-thermal pressure need to be included, the assumed hydrostatic equilibrium may not be a good approximation in the X-ray modelings of NGC 4649, or our assumptions used in the dynamical models are biased. Our new black hole mass is about two times larger than the previous published value; the earlier model did not adequately sample the orbits required to match the large tangential anisotropy in the galaxy center. If we assume that there is no dark matter, the results on the black hole mass and M/L do not change significantly, which we attribute to the inclusion of HST spectra, the sparse globular cluster kinematics, and a diffuse dark matter halo. Without the HST data, the significance of the black hole detection is greatly reduced.

Accepted for publication in ApJ. emulateapj format. 11 pages

References in corpus (17)

Cited by in corpus (84)