The MASSIVE Survey XIII -- Spatially Resolved Stellar Kinematics in the Central 1 kpc of 20 Massive Elliptical Galaxies with the GMOS-North Integral-Field Spectrograph

Abstract

We use observations from the GEMINI-N/GMOS integral-field spectrograph (IFS) to obtain spatially resolved stellar kinematics of the central $\sim 1$ kpc of 20 early-type galaxies (ETGs) with stellar masses greater than $10^{11.7}{M}_{\odot }$ in the MASSIVE survey. Together with observations from the wide-field Mitchell IFS at McDonald Observatory in our earlier work, we obtain unprecedentedly detailed kinematic maps of local massive ETGs, covering a scale of $\sim 0.1-30$ kpc. The high ($\sim 120$) signal-to-noise of the GMOS spectra enable us to obtain two-dimensional maps of the line-of-sight velocity, velocity dispersion $\sigma$, as well as the skewness $h_3$ and kurtosis $h_4$ of the stellar velocity distributions. All but one galaxy in the sample have $\sigma (R)$ profiles that increase towards the center, whereas the slope of $\sigma (R)$ at one effective radius ($R_e$) can be of either sign. The $h_4$ is generally positive, with 14 of the 20 galaxies having positive $h_4$ within the GMOS aperture and 18 having positive $h_4$ within $1R_e$. The positive $h_4$ and rising $\sigma (R)$ towards small radii are indicative of a central black hole and velocity anisotropy. We demonstrate the constraining power of the data on the mass distributions in ETGs by applying Jeans anisotropic modeling (JAM) to NGC~1453, the most regular fast rotator in the sample. Despite the limitations of JAM, we obtain a clear ${\chi }^2$ minimum in black hole mass, stellar mass-to-light ratio, velocity anisotropy parameters, and the circular velocity of the dark matter halo.

Accepted to ApJ

References in corpus (13)

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• Measuring the inclination and mass-to-light ratio of axisymmetric galaxies via anisotropic Jeans models of stellar kinematics
• The MASSIVE Survey - I. A Volume-Limited Integral-Field Spectroscopic Study of the Most Massive Early-Type Galaxies within 108 Mpc
• The SAURON project - VIII. OASIS/CFHT integral-field spectroscopy of elliptical and lenticular galaxy centres
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• Small scatter and nearly-isothermal mass profiles to four half-light radii from two-dimensional stellar dynamics of early-type galaxies
• Hunting for Supermassive Black Holes in Nearby Galaxies with the Hobby-Eberly Telescope
• The MASSIVE Survey - VIII. Stellar Velocity Dispersion Profiles and Environmental Dependence of Early-Type Galaxies
• The MASSIVE Survey - XII Connecting Stellar Populations of Early-Type Galaxies to Kinematics and Environment
• The MASSIVE Survey VI: The Spatial Distribution and Kinematics of Warm Ionized Gas in the Most Massive Local Early-type Galaxies
• IFU spectroscopy of 10 early-type galactic nuclei - IV. Properties of the circumnuclear stellar kinematics

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• The MASSIVE Survey -- XVII. A Triaxial Orbit-based Determination of the Black Hole Mass and Intrinsic Shape of Elliptical Galaxy NGC 2693
• The MASSIVE survey -- XIX. Molecular gas measurements of the supermassive black hole masses in the elliptical galaxies NGC 1684 and NGC 0997
• A Spatially-Resolved Survey of Distant Quasar Host Galaxies: II. Photoionization and Kinematics of the ISM
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