On the correlations between galaxy properties and supermassive black hole mass

Abstract

We use a large sample of upper limits and accurate estimates of supermassive black hole (SMBH) masses coupled with libraries of host galaxy velocity dispersions, rotational velocities and photometric parameters extracted from Sloan Digital Sky Survey i-band images to establish correlations between the SMBH and host galaxy parameters. We test whether the mass of the black hole, M_bh, is fundamentally driven by either local or global galaxy properties. We explore correlations between M_bh and stellar velocity dispersion sigma_e, i-band bulge luminosity L_i,bulge, bulge mass M_bulge, bulge Sérsic index n, bulge mean effective surface brightness <mu_e,bulge>, i-band luminosity of the galaxy L_i,gal, galaxy stellar mass M_star,gal, maximum circular velocity V_c, and galaxy dynamical and effective masses M_dyn,gal and M_e,gal. We verify the tightness of the M_bh-sigma_e relation and find that correlations with other galaxy parameters do not yield tighter trends. We do not find differences in the M_bh-sigma_e relation of barred and unbarred galaxies. The M_bh-sigma_e relation of pseudo-bulges is also coarser and has a different slope than that involving classical bulges. The M_bh-M_bulge is not as tight as the M_bh-sigma_e relation, despite the bulge mass proving to be a better proxy of M_bh than bulge luminosity, and despite adding the bulge effective radius as an additional fitting parameter. Contrary to various published reports, we find a rather poor correlation between M_bh and n (or <mu_e,bulge>), suggesting that M_bh is not related to the bulge light concentration. The correlations between M_bh and galaxy luminosity or mass are not a marked improvement over the M_bh-sigma_e relation. These scaling relations depend sensitively on the host galaxy morphology: early-type galaxies follow a tighter relation than late-type galaxies. If V_c is a proxy for the dark matter halo mass, the large scatter of the M_bh-V_c relation then suggests that M_bh is more coupled to the baryonic rather than the dark matter. We have tested the need for a third parameter in the M_bh scaling relations, through various linear correlations with bulge and galaxy parameters, only to confirm that the Fundamental Plane of the SMBH is mainly driven by σe with a small tilt due to the effective radius. We provide a compendium of galaxy structural properties for most of the SMBH hosts known to date

SUPERMASSIVE BLACK HOLES AND THEIR HOST SPHEROIDS. II. THE RED AND BLUE SEQUENCE IN THE MBH–M*,SPH DIAGRAM

“…Furthermore, many galaxies host both a classical and a pseudo-bulge (e.g., Erwin et al 2003Erwin et al , 2015Athanassoula 2005;Gadotti 2009;MacArthur et al 2009;Erwin 2010;dos Anjos & da Silva 2013;Seidel et al 2015). In the recent literature, pseudo-and classical bulges have frequently been divided at the Sérsic index n 2 sph = (e.g., Sani et al 2011;Beifiori et al 2012), although, from a selection of hundreds of disk galaxies imaged in the Kband, Graham & Worley (2008) observed no bimodality in the bulge Sérsic indices about n 2 sph = or any other value. While pseudo-bulges are expected to have exponential-like surface brightness profiles (n 1 sph  ), being disky components that formed from their surrounding exponential disks (e.g., Bardeen 1975;Hohl 1975;Combes & Sanders 1981;Combes et al 1990;Pfenniger & Friedli 1991), it has been shown that mergers can create bulges with n 2 sph < (e.g., Eliche-Moral et al 2011;Scannapieco et al 2011;Querejeta et al 2015), just as low-luminosity elliptical galaxies (not built from the secular evolution of a disk) are also well known to have n 2 sph < and even n 1 sph < (e.g., Davies et al 1988;Young & Currie 1994;Jerjen et al 2000).…”

“…The red dashed line indicates the BCES bisector linear regression for the bulges of the 45 early-type galaxies (E+S0), with the red shaded area denoting its 1s uncertainty. Beifiori et al 2012;Erwin & Gadotti 2012).…”

“…This "rough scaling" was a premature version of the early correlations between black hole mass, M , BH and host spheroid luminosity, L , sph and also host spheroid mass, M sph (Kormendy & Richstone 1995;Magorrian et al 1998;Marconi & Hunt 2003;Häring & Rix 2004). These initial studies were dominated by high-mass, early-type galaxies, for which they too reported a quasi-linear M M diagrams (Ferrarese & Ford 2005;Graham 2007;Lauer et al 2007a;Gültekin et al 2009;Sani et al 2011;Beifiori et al 2012;Erwin & Gadotti 2012;van den Bosch et al 2012;Vika et al 2012;Kormendy & Ho 2013;McConnell & Ma 2013) continued to use galaxy samples dominated by highmass, early-type systems with M M 0.5 10 , BH 8 ´ and they too recovered a near-linear relation. However, the consensus about a linear M M BH sph -correlation was not unanimous.…”

A counter-image to the gravitational arc in Abell 1201:Evidence for IMF variations, or a 10 10 M ⊙ black hole?

“…very massive central super-massive black hole. Empirically, black hole masses correlate most strongly with the velocity dispersion (Beifiori et al 2012), with the largest reported masses from dynamical studies being (1-2)×10 10 M ⊙ , e.g. in the BCGs NGC 3842 and NGC 4889 (McConnell et al 2011) and in the field elliptical NGC 1600 (Thomas et al 2016).…”

Expected properties of the first gravitational wave signal detected with pulsar timing arrays

“…We assign to each merging galaxy pair two SBHs with masses drawn from 13 different SBH-galaxy relations found in the literature (Häring & Rix 2004;Gültekin et al 2009;Sani et al 2011;Graham et al 2011;Graham 2012;Graham & Scott 2013;Beifiori et al 2012;McConnell & Ma 2013;Kormendy & Ho 2013), spanning a broad range of uncertainty and including recent observations that corrected SBH estimates upwards.…”