Upper limits on the mass of supermassive black holes from HST/STIS   archival data
  The growth of supermassive black holes (SBHs) appears to be closely linked with the formation of spheroids. There is a pressing need to acquire better statistics on SBH masses, since the existing samples are preferentially weighted toward early-type galaxies with very massive SBHs. With this motivation we started a project aimed at measuring upper limits on the mass of the SBHs in the center of all the nearby galaxies (D<100 Mpc) for which STIS/G750M spectra are available in the HST archive. These upper limits will be derived by modeling the central emission-line widths observed in the Halpha region over an aperture of ~0.1''. Here we present our results for a subsample of 20 S0-Sb galaxies within 20 Mpc. 
E. M. Corsini (1), A. Beifiori (1), E. Dalla Bonta` (1), A. Pizzella   (1), L. Coccato (2), M. Sarzi (3), F. Bertola (1) ((1...