The MASSIVE Survey -- XV. A Stellar Dynamical Mass Measurement of the Supermassive Black Hole in Massive Elliptical Galaxy NGC 1453

Abstract

We present a new stellar dynamical mass measurement ($M_{\mathrm{BH}}$) of the supermassive black hole (SMBH) in NGC 1453, a fast-rotating massive elliptical galaxy in the MASSIVE survey. We measure stellar kinematics in 135 spatial bins in the central 1.5 kpc by 2 kpc region of the galaxy using high signal-to-noise ($S/N\sim 130$) spectra from the Gemini-North GMOS integral-field spectrograph (IFS). Combining with wide-field IFS kinematics out to $\sim 3$ effective radii and stellar light distributions from Hubble Space Telescope (HST) WFC3 images, we perform Schwarzschild orbit-based mass modeling in the axisymmetric limit to constrain the mass components in NGC 1453. The best-fit black hole mass is $M_{\mathrm{BH}}=(2.9\pm 0.4)10^9{M}_{\odot }$; the mass models without a central black hole are excluded at the $8.7\sigma$ level. The NGC 1453 black hole lies within the intrinsic scatter of the SMBH and galaxy scaling relations, unlike three other galaxies hosting $\gtrsim 10^{10}{M}_{\odot }$ SMBHs in the MASSIVE sample. The high-$S/N$ GMOS spectra enable us to determine 8 moments of the Gauss-Hermite expansion of the line-of-sight velocity distributions (LOSVDs), which are used as constraints in the orbit modeling. The stellar orbits in the mass models are further constrained to produce negligible $h_9$ through $h_{12}$ to minimize spurious behavior in the LOSVDs. We show that truncating the series at $h_4$, as was often done in prior work, leads to a much weaker constraint on the inferred $M_{\mathrm{BH}}$ for NGC 1453. Furthermore, we discuss precautions and modifications that are needed to achieve axisymmetry in triaxial orbit codes that use the Schwarzschild method to sample the start space of stellar orbits in triaxial gravitational potentials.

Accepted for publication in The Astrophysical Journal. 22 pages, 12 figures; References updated

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Cited by in corpus (11)

• The Hubble Constant from Infrared Surface Brightness Fluctuation Distances
• Black Hole Mass Measurements of Radio Galaxies NGC 315 and NGC 4261 Using ALMA CO Observations
• The SAMI Galaxy Survey: The internal orbital structure and mass distribution of passive galaxies from triaxial orbit-superposition Schwarzschild models
• Infrared Surface Brightness Fluctuation Distances for MASSIVE and Type Ia Supernova Host Galaxies
• Keck Integral-Field Spectroscopy of M87 Reveals an Intrinsically Triaxial Galaxy and a Revised Black Hole Mass
• Triaxial Orbit-based Dynamical Modeling of Galaxies with Supermassive Black Holes and an Application to Massive Elliptical Galaxy NGC 1453
• The Correlation between Black Hole Mass and Stellar Mass for Classical Bulges and the Cores of Ellipticals
• The SAMI Galaxy Survey: Environmental analysis of the orbital structures of passive galaxies
• Dynamical modelling of the twisted galaxy PGC 046832
• Detailed shapes of the line-of-sight velocity distributions in massive early-type galaxies from non-parametric spectral models
• The MASSIVE survey -- XIX. Molecular gas measurements of the supermassive black hole masses in the elliptical galaxies NGC 1684 and NGC 0997