Measuring the mass of the central black hole in the bulgeless galaxy NGC 4395 from gas dynamical modeling

Understand

NGC 4395 is a bulgeless spiral galaxy, harboring one of the nearest known type 1 Seyfert nuclei.

• Although there is no consensus on the mass of its central engine, several estimates suggest it to be one of the lightest massive black holes (MBHs) known.
• We present the first direct dynamical measurement of the mass of this MBH from a combination of two-dimensional gas kinematic data, obtained with the adaptive optics assisted near infrared integral field spectrograph Gemini/NIFS, and high-resolution multiband photometric data from Hubble Space Telescope's Wide Field Camera 3 (HST/WFC3).
• We use the photometric data to model the shape and stellar mass-to-light ratio (M/L) of the nuclear star cluster.