21.02.2013 Views

Gas Disks and Supermassive Black Holes in Nearby Radio Galaxies

Gas Disks and Supermassive Black Holes in Nearby Radio Galaxies

Gas Disks and Supermassive Black Holes in Nearby Radio Galaxies

SHOW MORE
SHOW LESS

You also want an ePaper? Increase the reach of your titles

YUMPU automatically turns print PDFs into web optimized ePapers that Google loves.

Chapter 4<br />

Model<strong>in</strong>g gas <strong>in</strong> gravitational<br />

potentials<br />

4.1 Introduction<br />

Spectroscopic observations from the Hubble Space Telescope have made it possible<br />

to attempt to measure the black hole masses <strong>in</strong> the centers of nearby galaxies us<strong>in</strong>g<br />

stellar <strong>and</strong> gas k<strong>in</strong>ematics (see Chapter 1). The black hole masses correlate somewhat<br />

with the host lum<strong>in</strong>osity, <strong>and</strong> more tightly with the <strong>in</strong>ner velocity dispersion of the<br />

stars (‘<strong>in</strong>ner’ refers to <strong>in</strong>side the effective radius (Chapter 2), but still on much larger<br />

scales than the region we describe as ‘central’ or ‘nuclear’ through this thesis). In<br />

Chapter 3 we presented spectroscopic observations of the emission l<strong>in</strong>e gas <strong>in</strong> the<br />

nuclear regions of our sample of 21 nearby radio-galaxies (Chapter 2). Here, we may<br />

try to learn more about those data by compar<strong>in</strong>g our observational results to models<br />

147

Hooray! Your file is uploaded and ready to be published.

Saved successfully!

Ooh no, something went wrong!