Institute for Advanced Study/Princeton University Joint Astrophysics Colloquium

Supermassive black holes are found in the centers of all massive galaxies, and they are believed to play a major role in regulating the evolution of massive early-type galaxies. The relationships between black hole mass and host galaxy properties (including mass and velocity dispersion) provide important benchmarks for testing models of black hole-galaxy coevolution, and accurate measurements of black hole masses in nearby galaxies are essential for this work. It has long been anticipated that ALMA observations of molecular gas kinematics in galaxy nuclei could be used to measure the masses of central black holes, and during the past few years this method has been used to obtain robust mass measurements for several targets. I will present results from an ALMA program to observe massive early-type (E and S0) galaxies containing circumnuclear gas disks, and discuss how ALMA can now provide the most precise determinations of black hole masses at the upper end of the black hole mass range.