The Relation between Black Hole Mass, Bulge Mass, and Near-Infrared Luminosity

The Relation between Black Hole Mass, Bulge Mass, and Near-Infrared
Luminosity

Authors:
Alessandro Marconi,
Leslie K. Hunt

Comments: Astrophysical Journal Letters, in press

We present new accurate near-infrared (NIR) spheroid (bulge) structural
parameters obtained by two-dimensional image analysis for all galaxies with a
direct black hole (BH) mass determination. As expected, NIR bulge luminosities
Lbul and BH masses are tightly correlated, and if we consider only those
galaxies with secure BH mass measurement and accurate Lbul (27 objects), the
spread of MBH-Lbul is similar to MBH-sigma, where sigma is the effective
stellar velocity dispersion. We find an intrinsic rms scatter of ~0.3 dex in
log MBH. By combining the bulge effective radii R_e measured in our analysis
with sigma, we find a tight linear correlation (rms ~ 0.25 dex) between MBH and
the virial bulge mass (propto R_e sigma^2), with <MBH/Mbul> ~ 0.002. A partial
correlation analysis shows that MBH depends on both sigma and R_e, and that
both variables are necessary to drive the correlations between MBH and other
bulge properties.

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