ALMA precisely measures black hole mass
Thursday, June 18, 2015 - 04:00
in Astronomy & Space
A research group led by Kyoko Onishi at the SOKENDAI (The Graduate University for Advanced Studies), including a researcher in the National Astronomical Observatory of Japan (NAOJ), National Institutes of Natural Sciences (NINS), observed the barred spiral galaxy NGC 1097 with ALMA and found that the central supermassive black hole (SMBH) has a mass 140 million times the mass of the Sun. Since galaxies are believed to have co-evolved with SMBHs, SMBH mass is an important parameter in understanding their relation in the context of galaxy evolution. This research result is based on the ALMA observation data obtained within a two-hour observation, which demonstrates the outstanding capacity of ALMA in the SMBH mass measurement.