Effect of a dark matter halo on the determination of black hole masses

Understand

Stellar dynamical modeling is a powerful method to determine the mass of black holes in quiescent galaxies.

• However, in previous work the presence of a dark matter halo has been ignored in the modeling.
• Gebhardt & Thomas (2009) showed that accounting for a dark matter halo increased the black hole mass of the massive galaxy M87 by a factor of two.
• We used a sample of 12 galaxies to investigate the effect of accounting for a dark matter halo in the dynamical modeling in more detail, and also updated the masses using improved modeling.