Supermassive black holes do not correlate with galaxy disks or pseudobulges

Abstract

Figure 1 | Correlations of dynamically measured black hole masses M• with the K-band (2.2 µm) absolute magnitude of (a) the disk component with bulge light removed, (b) the bulge with disk light removed, and (c) the pseudobulge with disk light removed. All plotted data are published elsewhere; parameters and sources are discussed in the Supplementary Information, and those for disk galaxies are tabulated there. Elliptical galaxies are plotted in black; classical bulges are plotted in red; pseudobulges are plotted in blue. One galaxy with a dominant pseudobulge but with a possible small classical bulge (NGC 2787) is plotted with a blue symbol that has a red center. In least-squares fits, it is included with the pseudobulges. Error bars are 1 sigma. In panel (b) the red and black points show a good correlation between M • and bulge luminosity; a symmetric, least-squares fit 4 of a straight line has χ 2 = 12.1 per degree of freedom and a Pearson correlation coefficient of r = -0.82. (All χ 2 values quoted in this paper are per degree of freedom.) In contrast, in panel (a), the red and blue points together confirm a previous result 1 that BHs do not correlate with disks: χ 2 = 81 and r = 0.41. Green points are for galaxies that contain neither a classical nor a pseudo bulge but only a nuclear star cluster; i. e., these are pure-disk galaxies. They are not included in the above fit, but they strengthen our conclusion. Similarly, in panel (c) the blue points for pseudobulges show no correlation: χ 2 = 63 and r = 0.27. In all panels, galaxies that have only M • limits are plotted with open symbols; they were chosen to increase our dynamic range. They, too, support our conclusions. This figure uses K-band magnitudes to minimize effects of star formation and internal absorption, but the Supplementary Information shows that Figure 1 looks essentially the same for V-band (5500 A) magnitudes.The masses of supermassive black holes are known to correlate with the properties of the bulge components of their host galaxies 1-5 . In contrast, they appear not to correlate with galaxy disks 1 . Disk-grown pseudobulges are intermediate in properties between bulges and disks 6 . It has been unclear whether they do 1,5 or do not 7-9 correlate with black holes in the same way that bulges do, because too few pseudobulges were classified to provide a clear result. At stake are conclusions about which parts of galaxies coevolve with black holes 10 , possibly by being regulated by energy feedback from black holes 11 . Here we report pseudobulge classifications for galaxies with dynamically detected black holes and combine them with recent measurements of velocity dispersions in the biggest bulgeless galaxies 12 . These data confirm that black holes do not correlate with disks and show that they correlate little or not at all with pseudobulges. We suggest that there are two different modes of black hole feeding. Black holes in bulges grow rapidly to high masses when mergers drive gas infall that feeds quasar-like events. In contrast, small ...

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