The MASSIVE Survey XIII. Spatially Resolved Stellar Kinematics in the Central 1 kpc of 20 Massive Elliptical Galaxies with the GMOS-North Integral Field Spectrograph

Abstract

We use observations from the GEMINI-N/GMOS integral-field spectrograph (IFS) to obtain spatially resolved stellar kinematics of the central ∼ 1 kpc of 20 early-type galaxies (ETGs) with stellar masses greater than 10 11.7 M in the MASSIVE survey. Together with observations from the wide-field Mitchell IFS at McDonald Observatory in our earlier work, we obtain unprecedentedly detailed kinematic maps of local massive ETGs, covering a scale of ∼ 0.1 − 30 kpc. The high (∼ 120) signal-to-noise of the GMOS spectra enable us to obtain two-dimensional maps of the line-of-sight velocity, velocity dispersion σ, as well as the skewness h 3 and kurtosis h 4 of the stellar velocity distributions. All but one galaxy in the sample have σ(R) profiles that increase towards the center, whereas the slope of σ(R) at one effective radius (R e ) can be of either sign. The h 4 is generally positive, with 14 of the 20 galaxies having positive h 4 within the GMOS aperture and 18 having positive h 4 within 1R e . The positive h 4 and rising σ(R) towards small radii are indicative of a central black hole and velocity anisotropy. We demonstrate the constraining power of the data on the mass distributions in ETGs by applying Jeans anisotropic modeling (JAM) to NGC 1453, the most regular fast rotator in the sample. Despite the limitations of JAM, we obtain a clear χ 2 minimum in black hole mass, stellar mass-to-light ratio, velocity anisotropy parameters, and the circular velocity of the dark matter halo.

The MASSIVE Survey. XV. A Stellar Dynamical Mass Measurement of the Supermassive Black Hole in Massive Elliptical Galaxy NGC 1453

“…Further details are described in Ma et al (2014) and Veale et al (2017a). As can be seen in Figure 4 here and Figure 21 of Ene et al (2019), the kinematic moments in the innermost Mitchell bins match well with the GMOS moments.…”

“…See Sec. 4 of Ene et al (2019) for a detailed discussion. The maps of the 8 kinematic moments, V , σ, h 3 , .…”

“…More M BH measurements in this mass range are clearly needed to quantify more robustly the upper end of the M BH -galaxy scaling relations for a better understanding of black hole feedback processes and massive galaxy evolution. We have acquired the spectroscopic and photometric data that are needed to perform dynamical modeling for the 20 galaxies reported in Ene et al (2019) and several other galaxies in the MASSIVE survey.…”

A Spatially Resolved Survey of Distant Quasar Host Galaxies. II. Photoionization and Kinematics of the ISM

“…This is also true when applied to the more distant quasar host galaxies studied with 158 μm [C II] emission. In nearby galaxies, there is a dependence on the velocity dispersion with the radius from the galaxy center (Bennert et al 2018;Ene et al 2019). However, based on the local galaxy observations, the velocity dispersion is unlikely to increase by ∼200 km s −1 , which is necessary to bring the galaxies onto the local scaling relations.…”

“…where C = 5 for a uniform rotating sphere (Erb et al 2006b). We assume 7 kpc for the radius, which is the median effective radius of massive quiescent galaxies in the local universe (Ene et al 2019). Here σ is derived from a Gaussian fit to the integrated spectra over the distinct region.…”