Journal article
WISDOM Project – XXII. A 5 per cent precision CO-dynamical supermassive black hole mass measurement in the galaxy NGC 383
- Abstract:
- We present a measurement of the supermassive black hole (SMBH) mass of the nearby lenticular galaxy NGC 383, based on Atacama Large Millimeter/sub-millimeter Array (ALMA) observations of the 12CO(2-1) emission line with an angular resolution of 0.″050×0.″024 (≈16×8 pc2). These observations spatially resolve the nuclear molecular gas disc down to ≈41,300 Schwarzschild radii and the SMBH sphere of influence by a factor of ≈24 radially, better than any other SMBH mass measurement using molecular gas to date. The high resolution enables us to probe material with a maximum circular velocity of ≈1040 km/s-1, even higher than those of the highest-resolution SMBH mass measurements using megamasers. We detect a clear Keplerian increase (from the outside in) of the line-of-sight rotation velocities, a slight offset between the gas disc kinematic (i.e. the position of the SMBH) and morphological (i.e. the centre of the molecular gas emission) centres, an asymmetry of the innermost rotation velocity peaks and evidence for a mild position angle warp and/or non-circular motions within the central ≈0.″3 arcsec. By forward modelling the mass distribution and ALMA data cube, we infer a SMBH mass of (3.58±0.19)×109 M⊙ (1σ confidence interval), more precise (5%) but consistent within ≈1.4σ with the previous measurement using lower-resolution molecular gas data. Our measurement emphasises the importance of high spatial resolution observations for precise SMBH mass determinations.
- Publication status:
- Published
- Peer review status:
- Peer reviewed
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(Preview, Version of record, pdf, 7.8MB, Terms of use)
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- Publisher copy:
- 10.1093/mnras/staf055
Authors
+ Science and Technology Facilities Council
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- Funder identifier:
- https://ror.org/057g20z61
- Grant:
- ST/X508664/1
- ST/W000903/1
- ST/K00106X/1
- ST/S00033X/1
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- Journal:
- Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society More from this journal
- Volume:
- 537
- Issue:
- 1
- Pages:
- 520-536
- Publication date:
- 2025-01-11
- Acceptance date:
- 2025-01-08
- DOI:
- EISSN:
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1365-2966
- ISSN:
-
0035-8711
- Language:
-
English
- Keywords:
- Pubs id:
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2078750
- Local pid:
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pubs:2078750
- Deposit date:
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2025-03-14
- ARK identifier:
Terms of use
- Copyright holder:
- Zhang et al.
- Copyright date:
- 2025
- Rights statement:
- © 2025 The Author(s). Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of Royal Astronomical Society. This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted reuse, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.
- Licence:
- CC Attribution (CC BY)
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