A massive black hole at the centre of the quiescent galaxy M32

Roeland P. van der Marel, P. Tim de Zeeuw, Hans-Walter Rix and Gerald D. Quinlan
Additional contact information
Roeland P. van der Marel: Institute for Advanced Study
P. Tim de Zeeuw: Sterrewacht Leiden
Hans-Walter Rix: University of Arizona
Gerald D. Quinlan: Rutgers University

Nature, 1997, vol. 385, issue 6617, 610-612

Abstract: Abstract Massive black holes are thought to reside at the centres of many galaxies1,2, where they power quasars and active galactic nuclei. But most galaxies are quiescent, indicating that any central massive black hole present will be starved of fuel and therefore detectable only through its gravitational influence on the motions of the surrounding stars. M32 is a nearby, quiescent elliptical galaxy in which the presence of a massive black hole has been suspected3–9; however, the limited resolution of the observational data and the restricted classes of models used to interpret this data have made it difficult to rule out alternative explanations, such as models with an anisotropic stellar velocity distribution and no dark mass or models with a central concentration of dark objects (for example, stellar remnants or brown dwarfs). Here we present space-based high-resolution optical spectra of M32, which show that the stellar velocities near the centre of this galaxy exceed those inferred from previous ground-based observations. We use a range of general dynamical models to determine a central dark mass concentration of (3.4 ± 1.6) × 106 solar masses, contained within a region only 0.3 pc across. This leaves a massive black hole as the most plausible explanation of the data, thereby strengthening the view that such black holes exist even in quiescent galaxies.

Date: 1997
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.nature.com/articles/385610a0 Abstract (text/html)
Access to the full text of the articles in this series is restricted.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:nat:nature:v:385:y:1997:i:6617:d:10.1038_385610a0

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
https://www.nature.com/

DOI: 10.1038/385610a0

Access Statistics for this article

Nature is currently edited by Magdalena Skipper

More articles in Nature from Nature
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sonal Shukla () and Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing ().