Date of Award

5-10-2017

Degree Type

Dissertation

Degree Name

Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)

Department

Physics and Astronomy

First Advisor

Misty C. Bentz

Second Advisor

D. Michael Crenshaw

Third Advisor

Rachel Kuzio de Naray

Fourth Advisor

Vadym Apalkov

Fifth Advisor

Christopher Onken

Abstract

Supermassive black holes (SMBH) are now thought to exist at the center nearly all massive galaxies. Not only are they thought to be ubiquitous, but it was also discovered nearly two decades ago that the mass of these SMBHs correlate strongly with properties of their host galaxies including bulge stellar velocity dispersion (MBH-sigma) and bulge luminosity (MBH-Lbulge). This correlation was not expected due to the tiny size of the SMBH gravitational sphere of influence compared to the size of the host galaxy, and imply a connection between the two, but this connection is still not well-understood. One step toward understanding this connection is to accurately measure the masses of these black holes. Two of the most common direct SMBH mass measurement techniques are stellar dynamical modeling (SDM), which generally only applies to quiescent galaxies, and reverberation mapping (RM), which can only be applied to active galactic nuclei (AGN) that exhibit broadened emission lines. Due to the unknown geometry of the region that produces these broad lines, the whole RM sample of black hole masses generally needs to be multiplied by a constant called the f-factor to bring it into agreement with the SDM sample on the MBH-sigma relation. It is unknown how well this f-factor, being a population average, applies to individual RM masses. It would therefore be useful to measure an SMBH mass with both methods simultaneously to test whether they produce the same black hole mass. However, because the RM and SDM techniques usually apply to galaxies that are not possible for both, this has only been attempted twice before (NGC 3227 and NGC 4151).

The purpose of this dissertation is to apply SDM to the SMBH at the center of NGC 6814 for which there already exists an RM mass. This makes it only the third broad-lined AGN for which an SDM mass has been derived. In order to perform SDM accurately, the distance to the galaxy needs to be well-constrained as the error in the SDM mass scales linearly with distance. Because no adequate distance measurements already exist, the first half of this dissertation is devoted to deriving a Cepheid distance to NGC 6814 from V- and I-band HST WFC3 time series photometry. We measure the distance to NGC 6814 to be 17.54 +1.44/-1.33 Mpc. In the second half, we incorporate that distance measurement into our stellar dynamical modeling on Gemini NIFS+Altair IFU data of NGC 6814's central 1.55''x1.55''. We derive a mass of 1.19 +37.57/-1.17 x108 solar masses, and best fit mass-to-light ratio of 0.948 +0.032/-0.208 in solar units. This mass is nearly an order of magnitude larger than the RM mass but has a 3-sigma range spanning nearly three orders of magnitude. We describe possible reasons for our larger-than-expected mass value, such as the existence of a bar, which would not be well-modeled by an axisymmetric dynamical code. Finally, we describe future steps that may be taken to better constrain the mass, such as creating more models to further explore parameter space.

DOI

https://doi.org/10.57709/9806373

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