Two ten-billion-solar-mass black holes at the centres of giant elliptical galaxies

Abstract

Observational work conducted over the past few decades indicates that all massive galaxies have supermassive black holes at their centres. Although the luminosities and brightness fluctuations of quasars in the early Universe suggest that some were powered by black holes with masses greater than 10 billion solar masses, the remnants of these objects have not been found in the nearby Universe. The giant elliptical galaxy Messier 87 hosts the hitherto most massive known black hole, which has a mass of 6.3 billion solar masses. Here we report that NGC 3842, the brightest galaxy in a cluster at a distance from Earth of 98 megaparsecs, has a central black hole with a mass of 9.7 billion solar masses, and that a black hole of comparable or greater mass is present in NGC 4889, the brightest galaxy in the Coma cluster (at a distance of 103 megaparsecs). These two black holes are significantly more massive than predicted by linearly extrapolating the widely used correlations between black-hole mass and the stellar velocity dispersion or bulge luminosity of the host galaxy. Although these correlations remain useful for predicting black-hole masses in less massive elliptical galaxies, our measurements suggest that different evolutionary processes influence the growth of the largest galaxies and their black holes.

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

“…One of these is the M BH -s relation (Ferrarese & Merritt 2000;Gebhardt et al 2000), which can be described with a single power law (M BH 5 6 s µ -) over a wide range in velocity dispersion (70 350 km s 1 --, e.g., Graham et al 2011;McConnell et al 2011;. The other is the L sph -s relation, which has long been known to be a "double power law," with L sph 5 6 s µ -at the luminous end 5 (Schechter 1980;Malumuth & Kirshner 1981;Lauer et al 2007b;von der Linden et al 2007;Liu et al 2008)and L sph 2 s µ at intermediate and faint luminosities (Davies et al 1983;Held et al 1992;de Rijcke et al 2005;Matković & Guzmán 2005;Balcells et al 2007;Chilingarian et al 2008;Forbes et al 2008;Cody et al 2009;Tortora et al 2009 When Graham (2012) pointed out this overlooked inconsistency between these linear and bent relations, he identified two different populations of galaxies, namely the core-Sérsic spheroids Trujillo et al 2004) and the Sérsic spheroids 6 , and attributed the change in slope (from super-quadratic to linear) to their different formation mechanisms.…”

The impact of galactic properties and environment on the quenching of central and satellite galaxies: a comparison between SDSS, Illustris and L-Galaxies

“…An artificial neural network (ANN) analysis performed by Teimoorinia, Bluck & Ellison (2016) established that for central galaxies the most accurate predictions for whether a galaxy will be star forming or not are given by central velocity dispersion, which outperforms all other variables considered, including bulge mass, stellar mass and halo mass. All of these inner-region galaxy properties are expected to correlate strongly with the mass of the central black hole (e.g., Magorrian et al 1998;Gebhardt et al 2000;Ferrarese & Merritt 2000, Haring & Rix 2004, McConnell et al 2011McConnell & Ma 2013;Saglia et al 2016) and hence may provide qualitative support for the AGN feedback driven quenching paradigm. However, it is certainly conceivable that other quenching processes could give rise to these trends without AGN feedback.…”

“…The strong observed correlations between central velocity dispersion and dynamically measured supermassive black hole mass (e.g., Ferrarese & Merritt 2000;McConnell et al 2011;McConnell & Ma 2013;Saglia et al 2016) offer an intriguing possibility to explain our observational trends. In many (if not most) semi-analytic models and cosmological hydrodynamical simulations quenching of central galaxies is governed by AGN feedback, in either the radio (e.g., Croton et al 2006;Bower et al 2008) or quasar (e.g., Hopkins et al 2008Hopkins et al , 2010 mode.…”

The discovery of gas-rich, dusty starbursts in luminous reddened quasars atz∼ 2.5 with ALMA

“…The reddened quasars could thus be plausible progenitors of the largest supermassive black holes seen in the Universe today, which have measured black hole masses of >10 10 M (e.g. NGC 3842 and NGC 4899;McConnell et al 2011). …”