The Morphology-dependent Black Hole–Host Galaxy Correlations: A Consequence of Physical Formation Processes

Abstract

For decades, astronomers have been investigating how the central supermassive black hole (BH) may govern the host galaxy’s properties and vice versa. Our work adds another step to this study. We have performed state-of-theart 2D modeling and multi-component photometric decompositions of the largest-to-date sample of galaxies with dynamically-measured black hole masses (MBH). The multi-component decomposition allows us to accurately extract the bulge (spheroid) stellar luminosity/mass and structural parameters (also for other galaxy components) and provides detailed galaxy morphologies. We investigated the correlations between MBH and various host galaxy properties, including the bulge (M*,sph) and total galaxy (M*,gal) stellar masses discussed here. Importantly, we analyzed the role of galaxy morphology in these correlations. Our work reveals that the BH scaling relations depend on galaxy morphology and thus depend on the galaxy’s formation and evolution physics. Here we discuss that in the MBH–M*,sph diagram, early-type galaxies (ETGs) with a disk, ETGs without a disk, and late-type galaxies (LTG-spirals) define distinct relations, with quadratic slopes but different zero-points. We also review the MBH–M*,gal relation, where ETGs and LTGs define different relations. Notably, the existence of the MBH–M*,gal relations enables one to quickly estimate MBH in other galaxies without going through the multi-component decomposition process to obtain M*,sph. The final morphology-dependent black hole scaling relations provide tests for morphology-aware simulations of galaxies with a central BH and hold insights for BH-galaxy co-evolution theories based on BH accretion and feedback.