Searching for a supermassive black hole with molecular gas and ALMA

Hope Boyce ( Université McGill )

We present a measurement of the mass of the supermassive black hole (SMBH) in the lenticular Fornax-cluster galaxy NGC 1387. A lenticular galaxy in the Fornax cluster, NGC 1387 contains a nearly face-on molecular gas disk at its centre. We map this disk through the detection of the CO(2– 1) emission line with data taken with the Atacama Large Millimeter/sub-millimeter Array (ALMA). This measurement marks the 6th SMBH mass measurement from the mm-Wave Interferometric Survey of Dark Object Masses (WISDOM), and demonstrates the power of this method to estimate central BH mass even when emission is missing from most of the central region containing the sphere of influence.