Gregory's ServerWe combined these observations with those for much less massive galaxies to build a model for the distribution of galaxy stellar masses. In the figure we compare our model against those which folks have previously constructed. Overall we find that there are about **twice** as many very massive galaxies (>300 billion times the mass of the sun) than folks have previously counted.
This is probably the result of a couple major improvements: more careful measurements of the faint outer region of these massive galaxies and the use of dynamical masses to calibrate the mass-luminosity relation.
This is one of the first important results of this paper -- previous papers have found that the high-mass end of this function is basically unchanged over the past 8 or so billion years. This is strange! We expect galaxies to still be growing and merging so this relation should be evolving a lot over time! Our new model **might** give evidence of that evolution
5/8
Okay, so what does that mean about the black hole mass distribution? Well, let's apply that scaling relation from toot #2. In the figure we find that there are about **twice** as many very massive black holes than suggested from previous models (which we might expect given that there are more big galaxies than prior models!). Our model (and its uncertainty) is shown with the violet band.
The number of black holes above 10 billion times the mass of our sun predicted by our model actually pretty closely matches what folks have found (the grey histogram)!
6/8
Okay, so what does that mean about the black hole mass distribution? Well, let's apply that scaling relation from toot #2. In the figure we find that there are about **twice** as many very massive black holes than suggested from previous models (which we might expect given that there are more big galaxies than prior models!). Our model (and its uncertainty) is shown with the violet band.