Overview
A dynamical mass measurement rests on resolving the region where the black hole dominates the gravitational potential and on modelling the motions of tracers within it. Stellar kinematics extracted from integral-field spectroscopy can be combined with photometric mass models through Jeans anisotropic or Schwarzschild orbit-superposition methods, and are available in essentially every galaxy, at the cost of degeneracies with the mass-to-light ratio, orbital anisotropy and dark matter. Cold molecular and atomic gas offers an attractive alternative, since gas discs in relaxed nuclei follow nearly circular, close to Keplerian orbits and are observable at very high angular resolution, but the interpretation must account for inclination, turbulence, non-circular motions and inflow. Using both tracers on the same galaxies is the most reliable route to controlling these systematic effects.
My Research
My analysis toolkit combines MGEfit for surface photometry, pPXF for stellar kinematics, JAM for dynamical models and KinMS for gas-disc modelling, applied to ALMA datacubes, JWST/NIRSpec integral-field data, VLT/MUSE and Keck/OSIRIS spectroscopy, and HST and JWST/NIRCam imaging. My master's thesis measured the supermassive black hole mass of NGC 7052 from high spatial resolution molecular gas observed with ALMA, and I am extending the same approach to a larger sample so that stellar and gas-based masses can be compared galaxy by galaxy.
Literature Review
Literature review for this theme is in preparation and will be added here.
Summary of Findings
A summary of key results and findings for this theme is in preparation and will be added here.