Supermassive black holes in six triaxial galaxies: Insights from SINFONI and MUSE observations

Sabine Thater; Avinash Chaturvedi; Davor Krajnovic; Michele Cappellari; Sadegh Khochfar; Thorsten Naab; Marc Sarzi; Glenn van de Ven

arXiv · 2605.28959

Supermassive black holes in six triaxial galaxies: Insights from SINFONI and MUSE observations

Sabine Thater·Avinash Chaturvedi·Davor Krajnovic·Michele Cappellari·Sadegh Khochfar·Thorsten Naab·Marc Sarzi·Glenn van de Ven

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Abstract

Dynamical modelling can be used to constrain the masses of central black holes; however, modelling massive galaxies is challenging due to their complexity. In this work, we report six new supermassive black hole mass measurements of massive early-type galaxies from stellar kinematics, which were extracted from adaptive optics-assisted SINFONI and MUSE observations. We combine the stellar kinematics with HST photometry to build DYNAMITE triaxial Schwarzschild orbit-superposition models. Our Schwarzschild models can recover the complex triaxial features of the galaxies and constrain the black hole masses of all six galaxies. We find that strong triaxial kinematic features can bias the mass measurements and correct for this effect. The derived black hole masses are (1.14^{+0.41}_{-0.63}) * 10^9 Msun for NGC 3706, (1.19^{+1.34}_{-0.80}) * 10^9$ Msun for NGC 3923, (1.14^{+1.08}_{-0.95}) * 10^9 Msun for NGC 4261, (4.68^{+2.99}_{-4.26}) * 10^8 Msun for NGC 4636, (3.51^{+3.37}_{-2.57}) * 10^9 Msun for IC 4296, and (2.43^{+1.53}_{-1.65}) * 10^9 Msun for IC 4329 at 3sigma confidence level. We compare our measurements with published results from axisymmetric Schwarzschild modelling and with our Jeans Anisotropic Models (JAM), and obtain mostly consistent black hole masses. Most of our black hole mass estimates can be well constrained using only MUSE observations. All of our mass measurements are in agreement with local black hole scaling relations.

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Sabine Thater, Avinash Chaturvedi, Davor Krajnovic, Michele Cappellari, Sadegh Khochfar, Thorsten Naab, Marc Sarzi, Glenn van de Ven. 2026-05-27. Supermassive black holes in six triaxial galaxies: Insights from SINFONI and MUSE observations. https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.28959

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