WISDOM Project - II: Molecular gas measurement of the supermassive black hole mass in NGC4697

Abstract

As part of the mm-Wave Interferometric Survey of Dark Object Masses (WISDOM) project, we present an estimate of the mass of the supermassive black hole (SMBH) in the nearby fast-rotating early-type galaxy NGC4697. This estimate is based on Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA) cycle-3 observations of the 12CO(2-1) emission line with a linear resolution of 29 pc (0.53"). We find that NGC4697 hosts a small relaxed central molecular gas disc with a mass of 1.6x10^7 Msun, co-spatial with the obscuring dust disc visible in optical Hubble Space Telescope (HST) imaging. We also resolve thermal 1mm continuum emission from the dust in this disc. NGC4697 is found to have a very low molecular gas velocity dispersion, ${\sigma }_{gas}=1.65_{-0.65}^{+0.68}$ km/s. This seems to be partially because the giant molecular cloud mass function is not fully sampled, but other mechanisms such as chemical differentiation in a hard radiation field or morphological quenching also seem to be required. We detect a Keplerian increase of the rotation of the molecular gas in the very centre of NGC4697, and use forward modelling of the ALMA data cube in a Bayesian framework with the KINematic Molecular Simulation (KinMS) code to estimate a SMBH mass of ($1.3_{-0.17}^{+0.18})\times 10^8$ Msun and an i-band mass-to-light ratio of $2.14_{-0.05}^{+0.04}$ Msun/Lsun (at the 99% confidence level). Our estimate of the SMBH mass is entirely consistent with previous measurements from stellar kinematics. This increases confidence in the growing number of SMBH mass estimates being obtained in the ALMA era.

16 pages, 11 figures, accepted to MNRAS

References in corpus (17)

• Improving the full spectrum fitting method: accurate convolution with Gauss-Hermite functions
• Direct cosmological simulations of the growth of black holes and galaxies
• The Resolved Properties of Extragalactic Giant Molecular Clouds
• COLD GASS, an IRAM Legacy Survey of Molecular Gas in Massive Galaxies: II. The non-universality of the Molecular Gas Depletion Timescale
• The ATLAS3D Project - XXVIII. Dynamically-driven star formation suppression in early-type galaxies
• The central parsecs of Centaurus A: High Excitation Gas, a Molecular Disk, and the Mass of the Black Hole
• The mass of the black hole in Centaurus A from SINFONI AO-assisted integral-field observations of stellar kinematics
• A black-hole mass measurement from molecular gas kinematics in NGC4526
• Giant Molecular Clouds in the Early-Type Galaxy NGC4526
• WISDOM Project - I: Black Hole Mass Measurement Using Molecular Gas Kinematics in NGC 3665
• A Measurement of the Black-Hole Mass in NGC 1097 using ALMA
• Spatially resolved variations of the IMF mass normalisation in early-type galaxies as probed by molecular gas kinematics
• A figure of merit for black hole mass measurements with molecular gas
• Optimization of Moment Masking for CO Spectral Line Surveys
• Companions to Isolated Elliptical Galaxies: Revisiting the Bothun-Sullivan Sample
• Outflow-Dominated Emission from the Quiescent Massive Black Holes in NGC 4621 and NGC 4697
• Prospects for Measuring the Mass of Black Holes at High Redshifts with Resolved Kinematics Using Gravitational Lensing

Cited by in corpus (24)

• Giant Molecular Cloud Catalogues for PHANGS-ALMA: Methods and Initial Results
• Spiral morphology in an intensely star-forming disk galaxy more than 12 billion years ago
• The MASSIVE survey - XI. What drives the molecular gas properties of early-type galaxies
• Revealing the intermediate-mass black hole at the heart of the dwarf galaxy NGC 404 with sub-parsec resolution ALMA observations
• The AGN fuelling/feedback cycle in nearby radio galaxies - I. ALMA observations and early results
• WISDOM Project - I: Black Hole Mass Measurement Using Molecular Gas Kinematics in NGC 3665
• Black Hole Mass Measurements of Radio Galaxies NGC 315 and NGC 4261 Using ALMA CO Observations
• WISDOM Project - III: Molecular gas measurement of the supermassive black hole mass in the barred lenticular galaxy NGC4429
• BASS XXVI: DR2 Host Galaxy Stellar Velocity Dispersions
• Six new supermassive black hole mass determinations from adaptive-optics assisted SINFONI observations
• WISDOM Project -- X. The morphology of the molecular ISM in galaxy centres and its dependence on galaxy structure
• WISDOM Project -- IX Giant Molecular Clouds in the Lenticular Galaxy NGC4429: Effects of Shear and Tidal Forces on Clouds
• Cold gas disks in main-sequence galaxies at cosmic noon: Low turbulence, flat rotation curves, and disk-halo degeneracy
• ALMA Observations of Circumnuclear Disks in Early Type Galaxies: 12CO(2-1) and Continuum Properties
• Two channels of supermassive black hole growth as seen on the galaxies mass-size plane
• Abell 1201: Detection of an Ultramassive Black Hole in a Strong Gravitational Lens
• WISDOM Project -- VII. Molecular gas measurement of the supermassive black hole mass in NGC 7052
• The MBHBM${}^{\star }$ Project -- II. Molecular Gas Kinematics in the Lenticular Galaxy NGC 3593 Reveal a Supermassive Black Hole
• Estimating the statistical uncertainty due to spatially correlated noise in interferometric images
• WISDOM Project -- XIII. Feeding molecular gas to the supermassive black hole in the starburst AGN-host galaxy Fairall 49
• How to Fuel an AGN: Mapping Circumnuclear Gas in NGC 6240 with ALMA
• Unveiling Kinematic Structure in the Starburst Heart of NGC 253
• WISDOM Project -- XIX. Figures of merit for supermassive black hole mass measurements using molecular gas and/or megamaser kinematics
• A self-supervised, physics-aware, Bayesian neural network architecture for modelling galaxy emission-line kinematics