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The Supermassive Black Hole at the Heart of Centaurus A: Revealed by the Kinematics of Gas and Stars

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 January 2013

Nadine Neumayer
Nadine Neumayer
Affiliation:
European Southern Observatory, Karl-Schwarzschild-Str 2, 85748 Garching bei München,Germany. Email: nneumaye@eso.org
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Abstract

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At less than 4 Mpc distance the radio galaxy NGC 5128 (Centaurus A) is the prime example to study the supermassive black hole and its influence on the environment in great detail. To model and understand the feeding and feedback mechanisms one needs an accurate determination of the mass of the supermassive black hole. The aim of this review is to give an overview of the recent studies that have been dedicated to measure the black hole mass in Centaurus A from both gas and stellar kinematics. It shows how the advancement in observing techniques and instrumentation drive the field of black hole mass measurements and concludes that adaptive optics assisted integral field spectroscopy is the key to identify the effects of the AGN on the surrounding ionised gas. Using data from SINFONI at the ESO Very Large Telescope, the best-fit black hole mass is MBH = 4.5(+1.7, −1.0) × 107 M⊙ (from H2 kinematics) and MBH = (5.5 ± 3.0) × 107 M⊙ (from stellar kinematics). This is one of the cleanest gas-versus-star comparisons of a MBH determination, and brings Centaurus A into agreement with the MBH−σ relation.

Keywords

galaxies: individual (NGC 5128)galaxies: kinematics and dynamicsgalaxies: nucleigalaxies: structuretechniques: spectroscopic
Type
Research Article
Information
Publications of the Astronomical Society of Australia , Volume 27 , Special Issue 4: The Many Faces of Centaurus A , 2010 , pp. 449 - 456
Copyright
Copyright © Astronomical Society of Australia 2010

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