Journal article
WISDOM Project–XXV. Improving the CO-dynamical supermassive black hole mass measurement in the galaxy NGC 1574 using high spatial resolution ALMA observations
- Abstract:
- We present a molecular gas dynamical supermassive black hole (SMBH) mass measurement in the nearby barred lenticular galaxy NGC 1574, using Atacama Large Millimeter/sub-millimeter Array observations of the 12CO(2-1) emission line with synthesised beam full-widths at half-maximum of 0.″078×0.″070 (≈7.5×6.7 pc2). The observations are the first to spatially resolve the SMBH's sphere of influence (SoI), resulting in an unambiguous detection of the Keplerian velocity increase due to the SMBH towards the centre of the gas disc. We also detect a previously known large-scale kinematic twist of the CO velocity map, due to a position angle (PA) warp and possible mild non-circular motions, and we resolve a PA warp within the central 0.″2×0.″2 of the galaxy, larger than that inferred from previous intermediate-resolution data. By forward modelling the data cube, we infer a SMBH mass of (6.2±1.2)×107 M⊙ (1σ confidence interval), slightly smaller than but statistically consistent with the SMBH mass derived from the previous intermediate-resolution data that did not resolve the SoI, and slightly outside the 1σ scatter of the SMBH mass–stellar velocity dispersion relation. Our measurement thus emphasises the importance of observations that spatially resolve the SMBH SoI for accurate SMBH mass measurements and gas dynamical modelling.
- Publication status:
- Published
- Peer review status:
- Peer reviewed
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(Preview, Version of record, pdf, 4.1MB, Terms of use)
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- Publisher copy:
- 10.1093/mnras/staf1161
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:
- 541
- Issue:
- 3
- Pages:
- 2540-2552
- Publication date:
- 2025-07-15
- Acceptance date:
- 2025-07-14
- DOI:
- EISSN:
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1365-2966
- ISSN:
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0035-8711
- Language:
-
English
- Keywords:
- Pubs id:
-
2249362
- Local pid:
-
pubs:2249362
- Source identifiers:
-
3144485
- Deposit date:
-
2025-07-24
- ARK identifier:
Terms of use
- Copyright holder:
- Zhang et al.
- Copyright date:
- 2025
- Rights statement:
- © The Author(s) 2025. 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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