Studying the effect of Dark Matter and galaxy shape on Supermassive Black Hole mass measurements using triaxial Schwarzschild modelling

Abstract

In this thesis, the masses of the Supermassive Black Holes of three early-type galaxies are measured using triaxial Schwarzschild Modelling. Particularly, this model includes a triaxial shape parametrization and dark matter, two significant parts of a general early type galaxy that a previous study [1] lacked but also studied the same sample. This study aims to find how the inclusion of triaxiality and dark matter affects the black hole mass measurement, as well as perform a consistency check for DYNAMITE, a dynamical modelling software developed at the University of Vienna. Three galaxies from the SMASHING sample are used, which have large-scale as well as high resolution IFU data of the center. Schwarzschild modelling confirms that these galaxies are very close to axisymmetric, and their measured SMBH masses are consistent with scaling relations as well as [1]. Inconsistencies with [1] are found in the best-fit values for Mass-to-Light Ratio which requires further study. Dark matter remains poorly constrained by dynamical modelling due to our use of stellar kinematics, but show low best-fit values in this study.