An Efficient Strategy to Select Targets for Gas-Dynamical Measurements of Black Hole Masses Using the Hubble Space Telescope

Abstract

Gas-dynamical studies using the Hubble Space Telescope are an integral component for future progress in the search for massive black holes in galactic nuclei. Here we present an extensive set of gas rotation curves obtained with the Space Telescope Imaging Spectrograph for the central regions of 23 disk galaxies. We find that the bulges of randomly selected, nearby spiral and S0 galaxies generally do not contain well-defined gaseous disks. Only 15%-20% of disk galaxies have regular, symmetric velocity fields useful for dynamical analysis. Through comparison of the kinematics with Hubble Space Telescope images of the nuclear regions, we show that the probability of success can be significantly boosted by preselecting objects whose central dust lanes follow a well-ordered, circularly symmetric pattern. The dust morphology can be ascertained efficiently by visual inspection of unsharp-masked images.

To appear in PASP. 7 pages

References in corpus (2)

• Dusty Nuclear Disks and Filaments in Early Type Galaxies
• Evidence for a Supermassive Black Hole in the S0 Galaxy NGC 3245

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