AAS 198th Meeting, June 2001
Session 84. Supermassive Black Holes: From the Sublime to the Ordinary
Invited, Thursday, June 7, 2001, 11:40am-12:30pm, C101-104

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[84.01] Supermassive Black Holes: From the Sublime to the Ordinary

K. Gebhardt (University of Texas at Austin)

In the past few years, supermassive black holes have gone from being considered possible oddities at the centers of galaxies to fundamental components of galaxies. This shift is due primarily to data taken with the Hubble Space Telescope which show that all bulge systems have supermassive black holes that correlate closely with properties of its host galaxy. These results strongly affect both formational and evolutionary scenarios for both black hole and galaxy. I will present the current state of our observational understanding, as well as results from 3-integral dynamical modelling. In addition to presenting black hole masses from spatially-resolved kinematics, I will present results calibrating reverberation and ionization models of AGNs. It appears that both of these techniques provide realiable measurements, and will therefore be essential to helping us understand the evolutionary history of supermassive black hole growth.


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