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Abstract

Quasars are associated with and powered by the accretion of material onto massive black holes; the detection of highly luminous quasars with redshifts greater than z = 6 suggests that black holes of up to ten billion solar masses already existed 13 billion years ago1. Two possible present-day 'dormant' descendants of this population of 'active' black holes have been found2 in the galaxies NGC 3842 and NGC 4889 at the centres of the Leo and Coma galaxy clusters, which together form the central region of the Great Wall3-the largest local structure of galaxies. The most luminous quasars, however, are not confined to such high-density regions of the early Universe4,5; yet dormant black holes of this high mass have not yet been found outside of modern-day rich clusters. Here we report observations of the stellar velocity distribution in the galaxy NGC 1600-a relatively isolated elliptical galaxy near the centre of a galaxy group at a distance of 64 megaparsecs from Earth. We use orbit superposition models to determine that the black hole at the centre of NGC 1600 has a mass of 17 billion solar masses. The spatial distribution of stars near the centre of NGC 1600 is rather diffuse. We find that the region of depleted stellar density in the cores of massive elliptical galaxies extends over the same radius as the gravitational sphere of influence of the central black holes, and interpret this as the dynamical imprint of the black holes.

Details

Title
A 17-billion-solar-mass black hole in a group galaxy with a diffuse core
Author
Thomas, Jens; Ma, Chung-Pei; McConnell, Nicholas J; Greene, Jenny E; Blakeslee, John P; Janish, Ryan
Pages
340-342H
Section
LETTER
Publication year
2016
Publication date
Apr 21, 2016
Publisher
Nature Publishing Group
ISSN
00280836
e-ISSN
14764687
Source type
Scholarly Journal
Language of publication
English
ProQuest document ID
1783950308
Copyright
Copyright Nature Publishing Group Apr 21, 2016