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Abstract Evidence for the majority of the supermassive black holes in the local Universe has been obtained dynamically from stellar motions with the Schwarzschild orbit superposition method. However, there have been only a handful of studies using simulated data to examine the ability of this method to reliably recover known input black hole massesM_BHand other galaxy parameters. Here, we conduct a comprehensive assessment of the reliability of the triaxial Schwarzschild method atsimultaneouslydeterminingM_BH, stellar mass-to-light ratioM*/L, dark matter mass, and three intrinsic triaxial shape parameters of simulated galaxies. For each of 25 rounds of mock observations using simulated stellar kinematics and theTriOScode, we derive best-fitting parameters and confidence intervals after a full search in the 6D parameter space with our likelihood-based model inference scheme. The two key mass parameters,M_BHandM*/L, are recovered within the 68% confidence interval, and other parameters are recovered between the 68% and 95% confidence intervals. The spatially varying velocity anisotropy of the stellar orbits is also well recovered. We explore whether the goodness-of-fit measure used for galaxy model selection in our pipeline is biased by variable complexity across the 6D parameter space. In our tests, adding a penalty term to the likelihood measure either makes little difference, or worsens the recovery in some cases. 

Abstract We present a stellar dynamical mass measurement of a newly detected supermassive black hole (SMBH) at the center of the fast-rotating, massive elliptical galaxy NGC 2693 as part of the MASSIVE survey. We combine high signal-to-noise ratio integral field spectroscopy (IFS) from the Gemini Multi-Object Spectrograph with wide-field data from the Mitchell Spectrograph at McDonald Observatory to extract and model stellar kinematics of NGC 2693 from the central ∼150 pc out to ∼2.5 effective radii. Observations from Hubble Space Telescope WFC3 are used to determine the stellar light distribution. We perform fully triaxial Schwarzschild orbit modeling using the latest TriOS code and a Bayesian search in 6D galaxy model parameter space to determine NGC 2693's SMBH mass (M_BH), stellar mass-to-light ratio, dark matter content, and intrinsic shape. We find $M_{\mathrm{BH}}=\left(1.7\pm 0.4\right)\times {10}^9{M}_{\odot }$and a triaxial intrinsic shape with axis ratiosp=b/a= 0.902 ± 0.009 and $q=c/a={0.721}_{-0.010}^{+0.011}$, triaxiality parameterT= 0.39 ± 0.04. In comparison, the best-fit orbit model in the axisymmetric limit and (cylindrical) Jeans anisotropic model of NGC 2693 prefer $M_{\mathrm{BH}}=\left(2.4\pm 0.6\right)\times {10}^9{M}_{\odot }$and $M_{\mathrm{BH}}=\left(2.9\pm 0.3\right)\times {10}^9{M}_{\odot }$, respectively. Neither model can account for the non-axisymmetric stellar velocity features present in the IFS data.