The black hole in IC 1459 from HST observations of the ionized gas disk

TL;DR

This study uses HST observations of the ionized gas disk in galaxy IC 1459 to measure the central black hole's mass, confirming its presence and constraining its size with detailed dynamical modeling.

Contribution

It provides a new measurement of the supermassive black hole mass in IC 1459 using high-resolution HST data and dynamical models that incorporate gas kinematics and stellar mass distribution.

Findings

Black hole mass estimated at 1-4 x 10^8 solar masses.

Models without a black hole are statistically rejected.

HST data effectively constrains the central mass distribution.

Abstract

The peculiar elliptical galaxy IC 1459 (M_V = -21.19, D = 16.5 Mpc) has a fast counterrotating stellar core, stellar shells and ripples, a blue nuclear point source and strong radio core emission. We present results of a detailed HST study of IC 1459, and in particular its central gas disk, aimed a constraining the central mass distribution. We obtained WFPC2 narrow-band imaging centered on the Halpha+[NII] emission lines to determine the flux distribution of the gas emission at small radii, and we obtained FOS spectra at six aperture positions along the major axis to sample the gas kinematics. We construct different dynamical models for the Halpha+[NII] and Hbeta kinematics that include a supermassive black hole, and in which the stellar mass distribution is constrained by the observed surface brightness distribution and ground-based stellar kinematics. All models are consistent with a black hole mass in the range Mbh=1-4 x 10^8 Msun, and models without a black hole are always ruled out at high confidence.