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On the Black Hole Mass-Bulge Mass Relation

Nadine Neumayer, Hans-Walter Rix

The Astrophysical Journal, 2004

1,622 citations

Abstract

We have reexamined the relation between the mass of the central black holes in nearby galaxies, M bh , and the stellar mass of the surrounding spheroid or bulge, M bulge . For a total of 30 galaxies bulge masses were derived through Jeans equation modeling or adopted from dynamical models in the literature. In stellar mass-to-light ratios, the spheroids and bulges span a range of a factor of 8. The bulge masses were related to well-determined black hole masses taken from the literature. With these improved values for M bh , compared to Magorrian et al., and our redetermination of M bulge , we find that the M bh - M bulge relation becomes very tight. We find M bh ~ M with an observed scatter of ≲0.30 dex, a fraction of which can be attributed to measurement errors. The scatter in this relation is therefore comparable to the scatter in the relations of M bh with σ and the stellar concentration. These results confirm and refine the work of Marconi & Hunt. For M bulge ~ 5 × 10 10 M ☉ the median black hole mass is 0.14% ± 0.04% of the bulge mass.

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