Research Division Seminar
Compact Galaxies and Super Massive Black Holes

Resumen

Most massive galaxies have supermassive black holes at their centres, and the masses of the black holes correlate with properties of the host-galaxy bulge component. These empirical scaling relations are important for distinguishing between various theoretical models of galaxy evolution, and they furthermore form the basis for all black-hole mass measurements at large distances. Observations have shown that the mass of the black hole is typically 0.1 per cent of the mass of the stellar bulge of the galaxy. Our spectroscopic survey with the Hobby-Eberly Telescope of 1000 nearby galaxies revealed several compact lenticular galaxies with extremely high velocity dispersions. The first example is NGC1277, which is a small, Re=1kpc, compact, lenticular galaxy with a mass of 1.2×10^11 solar masses. From the stellar kinematics we determined that the mass of the central black hole is 10^10 solar masses, more than 10 per cent of its bulge mass. I will present HST images and IFU spectroscopy of a dozen more compact galaxies that all appear to host extremely big black holes and have Salpeter-like IMFs. These local systems, with distances less than 100 Mpc, could be the passively evolved descendents of the quiescent compact nugget galaxies found at z~2 and the >10e9 Msun quasars that are found at z>6.