Detecting Intermediate-Mass Black Holes out to 20 Mpc with ELT/HARMONI: The Case of FCC 119

TL;DR

This study demonstrates that the ELT/HARMONI instrument can detect and measure intermediate-mass black holes in dwarf galaxies up to 20 Mpc away, using simulated stellar kinematic data.

Contribution

It presents a novel simulation-based methodology for detecting IMBHs in distant dwarf galaxies with upcoming ELT/HARMONI observations.

Findings

ELT/HARMONI can detect IMBHs with masses greater than 10^5 solar masses at 20 Mpc.

Simulated data analysis accurately recovers IMBH masses using Bayesian JAM modeling.

The approach is applied to FCC 119, illustrating feasibility for similar targets.

Abstract

Intermediate-mass black holes (IMBHs; $M_{BH} \approx 10^{3-5} M_\odot$) play a critical role in understanding the formation of supermassive black holes in the early universe. In this study, we expand on Nguyen et al. simulated measurements of IMBH masses using stellar kinematics, which will be observed with the High Angular Resolution Monolithic Optical and Near-infrared Integral (HARMONI) field spectrograph on the Extremely Large Telescope (ELT) up to the distance of 20 Mpc. Our sample focuses on both the Virgo Cluster in the northern sky and the Fornax Cluster in the southern sky. We begin by identifying dwarf galaxies hosting nuclear star clusters, which are thought to be nurseries for IMBHs in the local universe. As a case study, we conduct simulations for FCC 119, the second faintest dwarf galaxies in the Fornax Cluster at 20 Mpc, which is also fainter than most of Virgo Cluster members. We use the galaxy's surface brightness profile from Hubble Space Telescope (HST) imaging, combined with an assumed synthetic spectrum, to create mock observations with the {\tt HSIM} simulator and Jeans Anisotropic Models (JAM). These mock HARMONI datacubes are analyzed as if they were real observations, employing JAM within a Bayesian framework to infer IMBH masses and their associated uncertainties. We find that ELT/HARMONI can detect the stellar kinematic signature of an IMBH and accurately measure its mass for $M_{BH} \gtrsim 10^5 M_\odot$ out to distances of $\sim$20 Mpc.