A search for the most massive galaxies: Double Trouble?

Massive early-type galaxies follow a tight relation between the mass of their central supermassive black hole ($\rm M_{BH}$) and their stellar mass ($\rm M_{\star}$). The origin of observed positive outliers from this relation with extremely high $\rm M_{BH}$ ($> 10^{9} M_{\odot}$) remains unclear. We present a study of such outliers in the Hydrangea/C-EAGLE cosmological hydrodynamical simulations, designed to enable the study of high-mass galaxy formation and evolution in cl...

We present near-infrared observations of 35 of the most massive early-type galaxies in the local universe. The observations were made using the infrared channel of the Hubble Space Telescope Wide Field Camera 3 in the F110W (1.1 $\mu$m) filter. We measured surface brightness profiles and elliptical isophotal fit parameters from the nuclear regions out to a radius of ~10 kpc in most cases. We find that 37% (13) of the galaxies in our sample have isophotal position angle rotati...

The observed scaling relations between supermassive black hole masses and their host galaxy properties indicate that supermassive black holes influence the evolution of galaxies. However, the scaling relations may be affected by selection biases. We propose to measure black hole masses in a mass-limited galaxy sample including all non-detections to inprove constraints on galaxy mass - black hole mass scaling relations and test for selection bias. We use high spatial resolutio...

We analyze 40 cosmological re-simulations of individual massive galaxies with present-day stellar masses of $M_{*} > 6.3 \times 10^{10} M_{\odot}$ in order to investigate the physical origin of the observed strong increase in galaxy sizes and the decrease of the stellar velocity dispersions since redshift $z \approx 2$. At present 25 out of 40 galaxies are quiescent with structural parameters (sizes and velocity dispersions) in agreement with local early type galaxies. At z=2...

Massive galaxies, such as nearby ellipticals, have relatively low number densities, yet they host the majority of the stellar mass in the universe. Understanding their origin is a central problem of galaxy formation. Age dating of stellar populations found in modern ellipticals, and observations of star formation in high redshift galaxies, allow us to determine roughly when these systems formed. These age diagnostics however do not tell us what triggered star formation, or ho...

Using 145 early- and late-type galaxies (ETGs and LTGs) with directly-measured super-massive black hole masses, $M_{BH}$, we build upon our previous discoveries that: (i) LTGs, most of which have been alleged to contain a pseudobulge, follow the relation $M_{BH}\propto\,M_{*,sph}^{2.16\pm0.32}$; and (ii) the ETG relation $M_{BH}\propto\,M_{*,sph}^{1.27\pm0.07}$ is an artifact of ETGs with/without disks following parallel $M_{BH}\propto\,M_{*,sph}^{1.9\pm0.2}$ relations which ...

According to the Virial Theorem, all gravitational systems in equilibrium sit on a plane in the 3D parameter space defined by their mass, size and second moment of the velocity tensor. While these quantities cannot be directly observed, there are suitable proxies: the luminosity Lk, half-light radius Re and dispersion sigma_e. These proxies indeed lie on a very tight Fundamental Plane (FP). How do the black holes in the centers of galaxies relate to the FP? Their masses are k...

We report three new accurate mass measurements for the supermassive black holes hosted by the early-type disk galaxies NGC2787, NGC4459 and NGC4596. The targets were selected from a larger set of long-slit spectra obtained with the Hubble Space Telescope as part of the Survey of Nearby Nuclei with STIS (SUNNS). They display symmetric gas velocity curves that could be modeled as a rotating disk in the joint potential of the stellar bulge and a putative central black hole. They...

[Abridged] We use the NEWFIRM Medium-Band Survey (NMBS) to characterize the properties of a mass-complete sample of 14 galaxies at 3.0<z<4.0 with M_star>2.5x10^11 Msun, and to derive more accurate measurements of the high-mass end of the stellar mass function (SMF) of galaxies at z=3.5, with significantly reduced contributions from photometric redshift errors and cosmic variance to the total error budget of the SMF. The typical very massive galaxy at z=3.5 is red and faint in...

The central regions of galaxies show the presence of super massive black holes and/or very dense stellar clusters. Both such objects seem to follow similar host-galaxy correlations, suggesting that they are members of the same family of Compact Massive Objects. Here we investigate a huge data collection of Compact Massive Objects properties to correlate them with absolute magnitude, velocity dispersion and mass of their host galaxies. We draw also some preliminary astrophysic...