| Description: | A galaxy's black hole mass and dark matter profile provide significant clues as to its evolution and formation, namely the mass accretion history. These essential components are difficult to measure robustly however. I will give a general overview of the observational results for measuring the masses of black holes and the dark matter profile in nearby galaxies, including discussion of their effects on the stellar orbital distribution. I will focus the talk on the two extreme mass ranges, from whether globular clusters contain black holes up to black holes in the brightest cluster galaxies. The present results suggests that the black hole correlations span over seven orders of mass. I will show results from both new instrumentation and computational approaches that demonstrate we are obtaining robust measures of both the black hole mass and dark matter profile.
The optical composite image (UBVI) shows M87, also known as Virgo A, and its black-hole powered jet. |
