Gas Disks and Supermassive Black Holes in Nearby Radio Galaxies

of the features observed in the velocity profiles. Knowing the flux distributions at
higher spatial resolutions than the spectra are obtained at will yield models with far
stronger constraining power).
Integral field data may suffer from related problems, in that we would also expect
the exact placement of the flux, on sub-pixel scales where it is steep, to have conse-
quences in the observed kinematics and the relationship between dispersion axes and
kinematic axes will also be important, though now on a pixel-by-pixel level rather
than along the length of the slit.
Observed velocity profiles are convolved with all of the factors described above,
and the ‘raw kinematic data’ from observations is therefore likely to be somewhat
misleading about the true velocity profiles in the gas. Models are forced to have
an almost backwards approach to deconvolving these factors, by instead making con-
volved predictions based on the chosen input models. This means that the underlying
velocity profile is never seen, which necessarily makes the choice of model somewhat
hard (worse still, at this point, the state-of-the-art generally relies on a thin, circular
disk model settled in the major plane of the galaxy).
The galaxies for which thin gas disk modeling is considered to provide reliable
estimates of the black hole mass tend to be those few individual members of samples
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