Difficulties with Recovering the Masses of Supermassive Black Holes from Stellar Kinematical Data
Difficulties with Recovering the Masses of Supermassive Black Holes from Stellar Kinematical Data
We investigate the ability of three-integral, axisymmetric, orbit-based modeling algorithms to recover the parameters defining the gravitational potential (mass-to-light ratio ϒ and black hole mass M•) in spheroidal stellar systems using stellar kinematical data. We show that the potential estimation problem is generically underdetermined when applied to long-slit kinematical data …