WISDOM Project – XXV. Improving the CO-dynamical supermassive black hole mass measurement in the galaxy NGC 1574 using high spatial resolution ALMA observations

Zhang, Hengyue, Bureau, Martin, Ruffa, Ilaria, Davis, Timothy A. ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0003-4932-9379, Dominiak, Pandora, Elford, Jacob S, Lelli, Federico and Williams, Thomas G. 2025. WISDOM Project – XXV. Improving the CO-dynamical supermassive black hole mass measurement in the galaxy NGC 1574 using high spatial resolution ALMA observations. Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society 541 (3) , 2540–2552. 10.1093/mnras/staf1161

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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 $0\rm{$.\!\!^{\prime \prime }$}078\times 0\rm{$.\!\!^{\prime \prime }$}070$ (≈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 $0\rm{$.\!\!^{\prime \prime }$}2\times 0\rm{$.\!\!^{\prime \prime }$}2$ 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.

Item Type:	Article
Date Type:	Publication
Status:	Published
Schools:	Schools > Physics and Astronomy
Additional Information:	License information from Publisher: LICENSE 1: URL: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/, Start Date: 2025-07-15
Publisher:	Oxford University Press
ISSN:	0035-8711
Date of First Compliant Deposit:	29 July 2025
Date of Acceptance:	14 July 2025
Last Modified:	29 Jul 2025 09:30
URI:	https://orca.cardiff.ac.uk/id/eprint/180102

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