2026/07/28 by Thomas K. Waters, Kayhan Gultekin, Karl Gebhardt +2
Physics and Astronomy · #astro-ph.GA
paper · pdf · doi:10.3847/1538-4357/ae8793
23 pages, 9 figures, accepted for publication in ApJ
arxiv created 2026/07/28 · arxiv updated 2026/07/30
We present a stellar-dynamical mass measurement of the central black hole in the lenticular galaxy NGC~5102 (SA0-). Our analysis combines high-quality integral-field spectroscopy from the VLT Multi Unit Spectroscopic Explorer with high-spatial- and high-spectral-resolution Hubble Space Telescope Imaging Spectrograph observations, using the Ca II triplet as a stellar kinematic tracer. We constrain the black hole mass with axisymmetric, three-integral Schwarzschild orbit-superposition models, incorporating surface brightness measurements from HST F547M WFPC2 imaging. Assuming a distance of 3.66 Mpc, we find a black hole mass of (1.30+0.19-0.18)×106 \mathrmM\scriptscriptstyle\odot, which is within 1.7σ of a previous CO band-head-based Jeans Anisotropic Modeling result (M\bullet=(9.1+1.8-1.5)×105 \mathrmM\scriptscriptstyle\odot). Our measurement is also consistent with literature extrapolations of the M\bullet-σe relation into the currently under-sampled low-mass regime. The close agreement between these independent dynamical approaches provides external validation of the Jeans Anisotropic Modeling framework and supports the robustness of our Schwarzschild orbit-superposition result, bolstering confidence in future black hole mass measurements with this framework.