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REVIEW 3 major objections 5 minor 92 references

ALMA molecular gas kinematics pin NGC 7052's black hole at 2.5 billion solar masses and lower the galaxy's stellar mass-to-light ratio by 10%.

Reviewed by Pith at T0; open to challenge. T0 means a machine referee read the full paper against a public rubric. the ladder, T0–T4 →

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A new ALMA-based dynamical model confirms the central black hole of NGC 7052 weighs about 2.5 billion solar masses and revises the galaxy's I-band stellar mass-to-light ratio down by 10%.

T0 review reviewed 2026-08-05 challenge →

load-bearing objection Careful remeasurement of NGC 7052's SMBH confirms Smith et al.; the improved stellar model gives a 10% lower M/L, but the absolute M/L is distance-limited and the uncertainty reporting needs cleanup. the 3 major comments →

arxiv 2509.02956 v1 pith:22Z63AFO submitted 2025-09-03 astro-ph.GA

Revisiting the supermassive black hole mass of NGC 7052 using high spatial resolution molecular gas observed with ALMA

Hai N. Ngo , Dieu D. Nguyen , Tinh Q. T. Le , Khue N. H. Ho , Tien H. T. Ho , Elena Gallo , Kristina Nyland , Masatoshi Imanishi
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Kouichiro Nakanishi Que T. Le Fabio Pacucci Eden Girma
This is my paper
classification astro-ph.GA
keywords supermassive black hole massmolecular gas kinematicsNGC 7052ALMA 12CO(2-1)galaxy dynamicsmass-to-light ratiocircumnuclear diskearly-type galaxies
verification ladder T0 review T1 audit T2 compute T3 formal T4 reserved

The pith

A machine-rendered reading of the paper's core claim, the machinery that carries it, and where it could break.

The reading

The paper sets out to measure the mass of the supermassive black hole at the center of the early-type galaxy NGC 7052 by modeling the rotation of its cold molecular gas disk, observed in 12CO(2-1) with ALMA at 0.29x0.22 arcsecond resolution. The best dynamical model yields a black hole mass of (2.50 ± 0.37 [stat] ± 0.8 [sys]) × 10^9 solar masses and an I-band stellar mass-to-light ratio of 4.08 ± 0.23 ± 0.4 solar units, fully consistent with the previous higher-resolution ALMA determination. The authors argue their result is the more reliable one because they deconvolved the HST stellar-light image, used a wider field to include the galaxy's outer stellar mass, and included the molecular gas disk's own gravity—components the earlier work neglected. Those changes lower the mass-to-light ratio by 10% while leaving the black hole mass unchanged, and they rule out the older ionized-gas mass estimate of ~4×10^8 solar masses. If correct, the measurement strengthens the case that moderately resolved CO kinematics can deliver accurate black hole masses.

Core claim

Forward-modeling the ALMA CO cube as a thin, circularly rotating disk yields MBH = (2.50 ± 0.37 [stat] ± 0.8 [sys]) × 10^9 Msun and M/LF814W = 4.08 ± 0.23 ± 0.4 Msun/Lsun (3σ). The model includes a point-mass black hole, a PSF-deconvolved multi-Gaussian stellar distribution, and the molecular disk's own gravity, and fits the data with residuals ≲15 km/s. No-black-hole models fail to reproduce the central velocity upturn; an over-massive 4.5×10^9 Msun black hole overproduces it. The result confirms the earlier ALMA measurement, lowers the stellar M/L by 10%, and rejects the older ionized-gas estimate of ~3.9×10^8 Msun.

What carries the argument

The mechanism is forward modeling of the 12CO(2-1) data cube: a mock cube is generated assuming circular orbits in the combined potential of a point-mass black hole, a deprojected multi-Gaussian expansion (MGE) stellar mass distribution, and an MGE molecular-gas mass distribution, then convolved with the beam and compared with the data via Bayesian MCMC. The black-hole signal is the central rise in line-of-sight velocity within ~0.5 arcsec, where the black hole dominates the enclosed mass; the beam (0.31x0.23 arcsec) is ~1.5 times smaller than the sphere of influence (R_SOI≈0.45 arcsec, xi≈3.5), so the SMBH's influence is resolved.

Load-bearing premise

The adopted distance to NGC 7052 (69.3 Mpc) is the load-bearing premise: the black-hole mass scales linearly with distance, and the alternative 46.4 Mpc estimate would lower it by about 30%, outside the paper's quoted 3σ statistical band.

What would settle it

Measure the distance to NGC 7052 with an independent method accurate to ~10% (e.g., surface brightness fluctuations or a resolved maser distance). If the distance is 46.4 Mpc, MBH scales to ≈1.7×10^9 Msun, outside the quoted 3σ statistical band; if it is near 69.3 Mpc, the result stands.

Watch this falsifier. Get emailed when new claim-graph text bears on it.

If this is right

  • NGC 7052 becomes a secure high-mass point for black-hole scaling relations, lying within 1σ of the standard M-sigma relations as a slight positive outlier consistent with recent dry-merger growth.
  • Lowering the I-band mass-to-light ratio by 10% changes the partition of enclosed mass between stars and black hole at the resolution scale, sharpening the black-hole constraint.
  • The CO kinematics rule out the ionized-gas black-hole mass of ~3.9×10^8 Msun; even allowing an elevated M/L cannot reproduce the central velocity rise.
  • Because the molecular gas mass (~2.2×10^9 Msun) is comparable to the black hole mass, including gas self-gravity is necessary for unbiased MBH and M/L estimates in galaxies with massive circumnuclear disks.
  • The success at three times lower resolution than the earlier ALMA data indicates that, as long as the beam resolves the sphere of influence, intermediate-resolution CO observations are sufficient to measure MBH, including when a central hole in the gas disk is smeared out.

Where Pith is reading between the lines

These are editorial extensions of the paper, not claims the author makes directly.

  • If the alternative Tully-Fisher distance of 46.4 Mpc were correct, the black-hole mass would drop by ~30% to about 1.7×10^9 Msun, placing NGC 7052 closer to the predicted M-sigma sequence; the paper reports this sensitivity but keeps the 69.3 Mpc distance in its headline.
  • The improved mass-model recipe (PSF deconvolution, wide-field MGE, gas self-gravity) could be applied to the higher-resolution cube of the same galaxy; if the result still gives 2.5×10^9 Msun, the method's robustness to beam size and central-hole smearing would be directly demonstrated.
  • More generally, galaxies with large circumnuclear CO disks and gas masses near their black-hole mass may need the same gas-self-gravity correction, so prior MBH values in such systems could be re-examined.
  • A resolved measurement of the molecular gas vertical thickness and velocity-dispersion profile in NGC 7052, from deeper ALMA observations, would test whether the razor-thin, constant-dispersion assumption hides a small MBH bias.
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Editorial analysis

A structured set of objections, weighed in public.

Desk editor's note, referee report, simulated authors' rebuttal, and a circularity audit.

Referee Report

3 major / 5 minor

Summary. The paper re-derives the central black hole mass and stellar mass-to-light ratio of NGC 7052 from ALMA 12CO(2-1) observations at 0.31"×0.23" resolution. The authors construct an improved stellar mass model from the HST/WFPC2 WFC F814W image with PSF deconvolution and a wider field, add a molecular-gas mass model with M_gas≈2.2×10^9 M_sun, and fit the full data cube with KinMS using two prescriptions for the CO distribution (SkySampler and a two-Gaussian analytic model). They find M_BH≈(2.50±0.37 [stat]±0.8 [sys])×10^9 M_sun and M/L_F814W≈4.08±0.23 [stat]±0.4 [sys] M_sun/L_sun, consistent with Smith et al. (2021) but with M/L 10% lower. A series of robustness tests (thick disk, radial sigma_gas profiles, radial M/L profiles, unmasked MGE) leaves M_BH within roughly 10% of the adopted value.

Significance. If correct, this is a useful confirmation of the SMBH mass in NGC 7052 using only intermediate-resolution ALMA data, and it supports the view that resolving the sphere of influence, rather than pushing to the highest possible resolution, is the key requirement for molecular-gas black-hole measurements. The forward-modeling of the full data cube, the PSF-deconvolved wide-field stellar MGE, and the explicit inclusion of gas self-gravity (M_gas comparable to M_BH) are clear improvements over the previous analysis. The agreement between two independent gas-distribution prescriptions and the extensive robustness tests strengthen the dynamical measurement. However, the distance dependence of the stellar M/L and the treatment of the gas MGE in the potential need to be resolved before the headline error bars and the 10% M/L comparison can be taken at face value.

major comments (3)
  1. [Section 4.5.1 and Abstract] The distance systematic is propagated only to M_BH (M_BH ∝ D) and not to M/L_F814W. At fixed observed surface brightness in Lsun pc^-2, the stellar mass within a given angular radius scales as D^2, while the dynamical mass at that radius scales as D; the fitted M/L therefore scales roughly as 1/D over the region where stars contribute. With the alternative D=46.4 Mpc, the central M/L would be ≈6.1, far outside the quoted ±0.4 systematic. Thus the abstract's M/L value and the claim of a 10% lower M/L relative to Smith et al. are contingent on the adopted distance. Please propagate the distance uncertainty to M/L or explicitly state that M/L is quoted for the adopted distance only.
  2. [Section 3.3 and Section 4.1] The molecular gas MGE is fit to the zeroth-moment map of the 12CO(2-1) cube, and the text states that deconvolution with the synthesized beam is skipped because 'this was already accounted for when generating the zeroth-moment map.' The zeroth-moment map is beam-convolved, so this MGE is a smoothed representation of the intrinsic gas distribution. The MGE is then used in the galaxy mass model (Section 3.4) and in the KinMS circular-velocity calculation (Section 4.1). Since M_gas≈2.2×10^9 M_sun is comparable to M_BH, the gas potential is based on an over-smoothed mass distribution, which could bias the inferred M_BH. Please quantify the effect by using a deconvolved gas MGE (or fitting in the uv-plane), or demonstrate that the bias is below the quoted uncertainties.
  3. [Section 4.4, Table 5, Abstract] Section 4.4 states 'All uncertainties are given at the 1σ confidence level,' while the abstract quotes ±0.37×10^9 M_sun as the statistical uncertainty and labels the result as 3σ. Table 5 shows the 1σ uncertainty on log M_BH is ±0.02 dex (≈±0.12×10^9 M_sun), while the 3σ value is ±0.06 dex (≈±0.38×10^9 M_sun); the abstract uses the 3σ value. The 1σ/3σ convention must be made consistent between the abstract, the text, and the table so that the headline precision is unambiguous.
minor comments (5)
  1. [Section 4.4/Figures 9-12] The text says the SkySampler model 'significantly reduces differences' in the residual velocity field, yet the reported chi^2 values are lower for the axisymmetric model (chi2_red,min=0.754 vs 0.867). Please reconcile or explain this model-selection inconsistency.
  2. [Section 4.5.6 and Table 6] The claim that M_BH differs by 'less than 10% and 2% for the linear and Gaussian profiles' does not match Table 6: the linear profile gives log M_BH=9.41 vs default 9.40 (≈2%), while the Gaussian gives 9.37 (≈6%). Please correct the percentages.
  3. [Table 5] Under the 'Analytically axisymmetric function' block, the 'Mass model' rows appear duplicated from the SkySampler block (identical log M_BH and M/L values). This is likely a copy-paste error and should be checked.
  4. [Section 4.5.3] The sentence about 'less than 14% and 22% for the exponential and Gaussian sigma_gas(r) profiles' is unclear, and the fitted M_BH values quoted in that section differ from the default by only ~5-9%, not 14-22%. Please clarify the intended comparison.
  5. [Various] Minor typos: 'entire the image' (Section 3.2), '10 6 gas particles' should be '10^6' (Section 4.2.1), and 'Nanc ¸ay' formatting (Section 4.5.1).

Circularity Check

0 steps flagged

No significant circularity: MBH and M/L are obtained by forward-modeling the ALMA data cube with free parameters; comparison models and external checks are not used to set the result.

full rationale

The MBH and M/L estimates are derived by forward-modeling the observed ALMA 12CO(2-1) data cube with the KinMS tool (Section 4.1), fitting nine free parameters (including log MBH and M/L) via MCMC against the full 3D cube (Section 4.3). The stellar mass model is an MGE fit to HST imaging scaled by a fitted M/L; the gas mass model is fixed from the CO flux and a standard XCO factor (Section 3.3). The no-BH and 4.5e9 Msun models in Figure 10 are illustrative comparisons, not calibration inputs, and the consistency check against Smith et al. (2021) is an independent, externally published measurement using different ALMA data. Self-citations (e.g., Nguyen et al. 2020, 2022, 2025a,b) are methodological context and are not load-bearing: the central code (KinMS) and the data are external. The only near-loop is the iterative use of the best-fit M/L when constructing the stellar mass model in Section 3.2, but this is standard simultaneous fitting, not a definitional identity, because M/L is a free parameter constrained by the same cube rather than derived from MBH. Section 4.5.1 explicitly acknowledges MBH ∝ D with a ~30% systematic from the two distance estimates, but it does not propagate the distance uncertainty to M/L; this is a robustness gap in the quoted M/L error bar, not a circularity, since M/L is fitted independently and is not defined in terms of MBH or the headline result.

Axiom & Free-Parameter Ledger

9 free parameters · 7 axioms · 0 invented entities

The measurement rests on a standard forward-modeling framework. The free parameters are the nine KinMS model parameters fitted to the ALMA cube. The axioms are the standard assumptions of disk kinematics and mass modeling, plus the adopted distance and CO conversion factor, none of which are introduced ad hoc to force the result. No new physical entities are postulated.

free parameters (9)
  • log(MBH/Msun) = 9.40 (MBH = 2.50e9 Msun)
    Primary target of the fit; sampled logarithmically in MCMC to span several orders of magnitude.
  • M/L_F814W (Msun/Lsun) = 4.08
    Constant stellar mass-to-light ratio scaled to match the observed kinematics; anti-correlated with MBH.
  • f (Jy km/s) = 41.81
    Integrated intensity scaling factor for the gas distribution, compensating for flux not captured in CLEAN components.
  • i (degrees) = 73.49
    Inclination of the molecular gas disk, fitted from the data; affects deprojection and circular velocities.
  • Gamma (degrees) = 63.90
    Position angle of the disk major axis on the sky, fitted from the data.
  • sigma_gas (km/s) = 14.11
    Assumed constant turbulent velocity dispersion of the gas; radial profiles tested in Section 4.5.3.
  • x_c (arcsec) = -0.010
    Kinematic center offset relative to the phase center, fitted as a nuisance parameter.
  • y_c (arcsec) = -0.017
    Kinematic center offset relative to the phase center, fitted as a nuisance parameter.
  • v_off (km/s) = -13.234
    Systemic velocity offset, fitted as a nuisance parameter.
axioms (7)
  • domain assumption Molecular gas follows circular orbits in a razor-thin disk.
    Assumed in the KinMS model (Section 4.1 and 4.2); residual maps (Section 4.4, Figure 12) show |delta v| < 4%, but the model does not fit departures from circular motion.
  • domain assumption Observed CO linewidths are dominated by beam smearing and projection, modeled with a constant velocity dispersion.
    Sections 2.3 and 4.2.1; radial dispersion profiles tested in Section 4.5.3 produce MBH changes up to about 20%.
  • domain assumption Stellar mass follows the I-band light with a constant M/L, and dark matter is negligible within the CO disk.
    Sections 3.2 and 4.1; radial M/L variations tested in Section 4.5.6 change MBH by less than 10%.
  • domain assumption The distance to NGC 7052 is 69.3 Mpc.
    Section 1; alternative distance of 46.4 Mpc (Theureau et al. 2007) would scale MBH down by about 33%, acknowledged as the dominant systematic in Section 4.5.1.
  • domain assumption CO-to-H2 conversion factor X_CO = 2e20 cm^-2 (K km/s)^-1 and 12CO(2-1)/12CO(1-0) ratio of unity.
    Section 2.3; adopted from Bolatto et al. (2013) and Smith et al. (2021); uncertainty is not propagated into the quoted systematics.
  • domain assumption The SMBH is a point mass at the kinematic center, coincident with the radio continuum peak.
    Section 4.1; center offsets are fitted but small (Table 5).
  • domain assumption The stellar light distribution is axisymmetric and the MGE deprojection is unique at the fitted inclination.
    Section 3.2; deprojection uses a free inclination; NGC 7052's high inclination (i about 73 degrees) makes deprojection well-constrained (Section 4.5.4).

reviewed 2026-08-05 · how reviews work

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Cite this review

Pith. "Pith review of Revisiting the supermassive black hole mass of NGC 7052 using high spatial resolution molecular gas observed with ALMA." pith.science (2026). https://pith.science/paper/22Z63AFO

@misc{pith2026250902956,
  author       = {Pith},
  title        = {Pith review of: Revisiting the supermassive black hole mass of NGC 7052 using high spatial resolution molecular gas observed with ALMA},
  year         = {2026},
  howpublished = {\url{https://pith.science/paper/22Z63AFO}},
  note         = {Machine review of arXiv:2509.02956}
}
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abstract

We present our dynamical mass constraints on the central supermassive black hole (SMBH) in the early-type galaxy NGC 7052 using high spatial-resolution observations of $^{12}$CO(2-1) emission from the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA). The data were obtained during ALMA Cycle 7 and have a synthesized beam size of 0''.29 $\times$ 0''.22 (97 $\times$ 73 pc$^2$). The dynamical model yielded an SMBH mass of $\approx (2.50 \pm 0.37 \, [{\rm statistical}] \pm 0.8 \, [{\rm systematic}]) \times 10^9$ M$_{\odot}$ and a stellar-$I$ band mass-to-light ratio of $\approx 4.08 \pm 0.23\, [{\rm statistical}] \pm 0.4 \, [{\rm systematic}]$ M$_{\odot}$/L$_{\odot}$ ($3\sigma$ confidence intervals). Although our new ALMA observation has three times lower spatial resolution than previous ALMA data, it still resolves the SMBH's sphere of influence with a spatial resolution that is 1.5 times smaller than this sphere radius. While our $M_{\rm BH}$ estimate is fully consistent with the previous determination, the $I$-band mass-to-light ratio is lower by 10%. This difference arises from our improved galaxy mass model, which incorporates both the molecular gas distribution and the extended stellar mass in the outer regions of the galaxy, components that were previously neglected.

Figures

Figures reproduced from arXiv: 2509.02956 by Dieu D. Nguyen, Eden Girma, Elena Gallo, Fabio Pacucci, Hai N. Ngo, Khue N. H. Ho, Kouichiro Nakanishi, Kristina Nyland, Masatoshi Imanishi, Que T. Le, Tien H. T. Ho, Tinh Q. T. Le.

Figure 1
Figure 1. Figure 1: Left: Overlay of the HST/WFPC2 WFC F814W image with the high-resolution (beam size of 5′′) C-band (6 GHz) VLA image clearly illustrates the jet at a position angle of ∼18.5◦ , which corresponds to ∼45◦ relative to the dust plane. Right: Overlay of the Pan-STARRS 𝑟-band image with the 1.4 GHz NVSS contours (beam size of 45′′) highlighting the extent of the large-scale radio lobes. The galaxy has a stellar v… view at source ↗
Figure 2
Figure 2. Figure 2: The ALMA 12CO(2−1) integrated intensity (contours), which are overlaid on the HST/WFPC2 WFC F814W image to high￾light the coincidence of the gas distribution with the dust plane [PITH_FULL_IMAGE:figures/full_fig_p004_2.png] view at source ↗
Figure 3
Figure 3. Figure 3: The 1.3 mm continuum emission (Panel A) and the 12CO(2−1) emission moment maps of NGC 7052 derived from our ALMA data: integrated intensity (Panel B), intensity-weighted mean LOS velocity (Panel C), intensity-weighted LOS velocity dispersion (Panel D). The synthesised beam of the observation was illustrated at the lower-left corner in each map as the black ellipse. Panel E: the integrated spectrum extracte… view at source ↗
Figure 4
Figure 4. Figure 4: The comparison of HST/WFPC2 WFC F814W images with its MGE model is shown in 2D surface brightness density within the FoV of 80′′ × 80′′ (left) and zoom into 7′′ × 7 ′′ at the centre (right). Black contours represent the data, while red contours represent the model, highlighting their agreements at corresponding radii and contour levels. Yellow regions indicate the masked areas containing foreground stars, … view at source ↗
Figure 5
Figure 5. Figure 5: Cumulative mass comparison between our MGE model constrained from the WFC image and the model constrained by M. D. Smith et al. (2021) with the PC image. Both constraints used the same HST observations. and outer edges. The image was retrieved from the Hubble Legacy Archive (HLA16). We estimated the sky background on the image by taking the median values from various squared boxes of 20 × 20 pixels2 locate… view at source ↗
Figure 6
Figure 6. Figure 6: Panel A: Our MGE fitting approach for the nuclear 12CO(2−1) gas emission, where we fit the two emission peaks separately. In each MGE fit, the yellow regions indicate masked areas, including one emission peak and the overlapping region, which are excluded from the fit. Panel B: A 2D superposition of the two MGE fits: MGE 1 (red) and MGE 2 (green) over the ALMA 12CO(2−1) observation. The dashed lines in the… view at source ↗
Figure 7
Figure 7. Figure 7: The cumulative molecular gas mass reconstructed from our gas MGE models is validated against the estimate from the 12CO(2−1) emission observed with the Nobeyama 45-m single-dish telescope (Z. Wang et al. 1992). used to compute the circular velocity curve resulting from the gravitational potentials of those components. 4. DYNAMICAL MODELLING 4.1. KinMS tool To measure the 𝑀BH of NGC 7052, we analyzed our AL… view at source ↗
Figure 8
Figure 8. Figure 8: The morphological distribution of 12CO(2−1) gas is shown along a cut through the major axis, passing through the center and the two emission peaks of the integrated intensity map of NGC 7052. Our ALMA data is plotted in black, while our analytically axisymmetric model of two center-offset Gaussian functions for the gas surface brightness, is shown in green. 4.2.1. SkySampler Given the 12CO(2−1) emission of… view at source ↗
Figure 9
Figure 9. Figure 9: The comparison of 12CO(2−1) moment maps among our ALMA data (left), the best-fitting KinMS model applied the SkySampler tool (middle) and the best-fitting KinMS model assumed a sum of two center-offset Gaussians (right) to spatially describe the 12CO(2−1) distribution, shows a strong agreement between the two. For each moment map (data versus model), we used the same colorbar. Other demonstrations are all … view at source ↗
Figure 10
Figure 10. Figure 10: Upper-row panels: The PVDs compare our ALMA observations of the 12CO(2−1) emission (orange-filled contours) with different KinMS models (blue contours), which assumed the gas distribution with the SkySampler tool. These models are extracted along the galaxy’s major axis at a position angle of Γ = 63.9 ◦ and correspond to three different central SMBH masses: a model without a black hole (left), the best-fi… view at source ↗
Figure 11
Figure 11. Figure 11: Overlaid of our ALMA 12CO(2−1) integrated spectrum (black), which is shown in panel E of [PITH_FULL_IMAGE:figures/full_fig_p014_11.png] view at source ↗
Figure 12
Figure 12. Figure 12: The first-moment residual map (data-model) was derived by subtracting the intensity-weighted mean velocity field of the best-fit KinMS models from the observed data. The differences are ≲15 km s−1 (or ≲4%) for the best-fitting KinMS model with SkySampler and ≲40 km s−1 (or ≲10%) for the best-fitting KinMS model with an axisymmetric function, indicating good agreement between the data and the assumed model… view at source ↗
Figure 13
Figure 13. Figure 13: The PVD extracted along the CND’s major-axis (elon￾gated along the orientation of position angle Γ = 63.8 ◦ + 90◦ ) with a systemic velocity 𝑣sys = 4610 km s−1 . The best-fitting KinMS model using the SkySampler tool to describe the gas distribution is overlaid on the top as the blued contours. nearly three times higher angular resolution than our ALMA data. All other parameters also agree with their resu… view at source ↗
Figure 14
Figure 14. Figure 14: The corner plot shows the posterior distributions obtained after removing the initial 20% of the post-burn-in phase from a total of 105 MCMC iterations using the KinMS model, which assumed the gas distribution with the SkySampler tool. The top 1D histograms display the marginalized posterior distributions for each parameter, along with their 1𝜎 uncertainties (see text for details). The lower panels presen… view at source ↗
Figure 15
Figure 15. Figure 15: Same as [PITH_FULL_IMAGE:figures/full_fig_p017_15.png] view at source ↗
Figure 16
Figure 16. Figure 16: Position–velocity diagrams along the major axis of the best-fitting KinMS models using the SkySampler tool to describe the 12CO(2−1) gas surface brightness distribution, shown for models with linear (left) and Gaussian (right) 𝑀/𝐿F814W(𝑟) profiles. near the galaxy center due to beam smearing can lead to an overestimation of 𝑀BH. To assess the impact of these effects on the error budget of 𝑀BH, we allowed … view at source ↗
Figure 19
Figure 19. Figure 19: Our 𝑀BH estimate for NGC 7052 in the context of various 𝑀BH–𝜎 scaling relations and their intrinsic scatters. other parameters to achieve the best fit. The PVD along the major axis of this model is shown in [PITH_FULL_IMAGE:figures/full_fig_p020_19.png] view at source ↗
Figure 18
Figure 18. Figure 18: Enclosed mass of NGC 7052 (black solid line) as a function of radius, showing the contributions all mass components: 𝑀BH, stars, and ISM (i.e., gas and dust). only six positions along the major axis, rather than across the entire gas disk. In contrast, cold molecular gas is much less impacted by turbulence. Our measurement using our ALMA observation in this work is more consistent with M. D. Smith et al. … view at source ↗

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This paper was first reviewed by deepseek-v4-flash on August 5, 2026.