Detection of Supermassive Black Holes in Two Virgo Ultracompact Dwarf Galaxies

Understand

We present the detection of supermassive black holes (BHs) in two Virgo ultracompact dwarf galaxies (UCDs), VUCD3 and M59cO.

• We use adaptive optics assisted data from the Gemini/NIFS instrument to derive radial velocity dispersion profiles for both objects.
• Mass models for the two UCDs are created using multi-band Hubble Space Telescope (HST) imaging, including the modeling of mild color gradients seen in both objects.
• We then find a best-fit stellar mass-to-light ratio ($M/L$) and BH mass by combining the kinematic data and the deprojected stellar mass profile using Jeans Anisotropic Models (JAM).