Angular resolution 2026-10-14
Angular resolution describes the smallest angular separation or structure an observation can distinguish. A physical scale at distance subtends approximately radians when . Resolving a black-hole sphere of influence therefore involves distance as well as its physical radius, and useful kinematics also require adequate surface brightness.
Cosmological surface-brightness dimming Created 2026-10-20 Updated 2026-10-25
For freely propagating radiation with the usual distance duality relation, a fixed emitted bolometric surface brightness is observed smaller by . One factor each comes from photon energy and arrival rate, and two from the relation of projected angular area to luminosity distance. In a fixed observed photometric passband, spectral shifts add a band-dependent correction; the bolometric power is not automatically the monochromatic one. A distortion created by scattering the local cosmic microwave background has a different redshift comparison, as in the thermal Sunyaev-Zeldovich effect.
Dark-matter annihilation radiation Created 2026-10-14 Updated 2026-10-20
For identical self-conjugate dark matter particles, the pair-annihilation rate per volume is . If each annihilation releases radiated energy , volume emissivity is . Optically thin isotropic surface brightness is . The squared-density dependence assumes a spatially constant rate coefficient and a smooth density; unresolved substructure changes the average of the square.
If a dark matter particle of mass radiates power independently of its neighbours, optically thin isotropic emission has volume emissivity . Its surface brightness is and therefore traces the mass column rather than its square.
Effective radius 2026-10-24
The projected radius enclosing half an object's total luminosity in a specified photometric passband. For circular apertures, the mean linear surface brightness inside it is . Elliptical apertures require an axis-ratio factor or a circularized radius; that convention must be stated when comparing calibrations.
Faber-Jackson relation 2026-10-14
The Faber-Jackson relation is an empirical correlation between luminosity and stellar velocity dispersion for elliptical galaxies, approximately in its classical form. Slope, scatter, sample and band matter. A heuristic combines , common mass-to-light ratio, and common characteristic surface brightness . The luminosity-dispersion correlation alone does not imply those auxiliary assumptions, and extrapolation to a dwarf spheroidal galaxy is not guaranteed.
The fundamental plane relates effective radius, stellar velocity dispersion, and mean surface brightness of elliptical galaxies. Homologous virial equilibrium with constant mass-to-light ratio predicts ; empirical exponents differ. The two-variable Faber-Jackson relation is a projection, not the entire plane.
Integrated Compton parameter Created 2026-10-20 Updated 2026-10-25
For a source at angular diameter distance ,
The quantity measures volume-integrated electron pressure, hence thermal energy up to a known ideal-gas factor. The redshift independence of the thermal SZ distortion's surface brightness does not make distance independent. Angular integration region, beam convolution, temperature structure and cluster geometry matter when comparing measurements and mass proxies.
Isophotal photometry 2026-10-20
isophotal photometry measures an extended source's radiative flux inside a contour of fixed surface brightness. It misses light outside that contour. The fraction lost depends on the intrinsic brightness profile, convolution with the point spread function, sky background estimation and the chosen threshold. A per-pixel threshold is not a fundamental limit on fitting or averaging many faint pixels together.
Lensing magnification 2026-10-14
The signed magnification is the reciprocal determinant of the Jacobian matrix of the thin gravitational lens equation. Its absolute value gives the flux and solid-angle amplification; its sign gives image parity. Gravitational lensing preserves surface brightness in the geometric-optics approximation.
Line-of-sight projection Created 2026-10-20 Updated 2026-10-24
The map from a three-dimensional astronomical distribution to its observed sky position or integrated surface signal. For a scalar volume emissivity in simple transparent geometry, surface brightness is proportional to along the ray. Reconstructing the spatial distribution requires additional geometry or symmetry assumptions; a projected surface distribution is not a unique three-dimensional density.
Luminosity density Created 2026-10-14 Updated 2026-10-24
The luminosity per unit spatial volume. For a spherical source, its enclosed luminosity is , and its projected surface brightness is .
TODO: the original line-of-sight geometry figure on source page 8 is unavailable. The PDF calls an unembedded image and the documented archive parent has the same gap. Its exact drawn layout cannot be checked or reproduced. The surviving coordinate definitions suffice for the following standard spherical-projection derivation; no missing plotted values or drawn dimensions are supplied here.
The spherical density projection schematic below is original geometry constructed from these definitions, not a recovered examination figure.
Figure 1.
Original line-of-sight geometry from the surviving coordinate definitions; not the recovered examination figure
. Details.
Let be closest approach on a line of sight at projected radius . Euclidean spherical geometry gives . On either half-line, , and the two halves contribute equally. With identical stellar luminosity , , so
For an isotropic velocity distribution, the variance of any unit-direction projection equals . Explicitly, the line-of-sight contributions have weights from the radial component and from a tangential component; equality of their variances makes the sum . Consequently
Without isotropy the integrand instead has the factor . Thus the projection assumption is substantive, rather than something that can be inferred from spherical surface brightness alone. The missing illustration does not prevent recovering these algebraic expressions from the prose.
An observed catalogue is the result of a population, an instrument and a selection rule. Its astronomical selection function can depend on flux, color, size, surface brightness, sky location, cadence and follow-up success. The relevant cut is often on noisy measured quantities. A model that selects on noiseless true flux instead can predict a different sample even when it uses the same nominal threshold.
Malmquist bias occurs because brighter members of a population are visible through a larger volume in a flux-limited survey. For a uniform Euclidean population, and . The selected luminosity distribution is therefore weighted toward large . For an intrinsic Gaussian absolute-magnitude distribution with mean and variance , multiplying by and completing the square gives the Gaussian absolute-magnitude Malmquist shift
This assumes the stated simple population, a complete flux cut and no additional boundaries. Exactly identical noiseless standard candles have a distance truncation, not a luminosity spread to reweight. Scatter, extinction, cosmological volume and source evolution need their own model.
Lutz-Kelker bias concerns parallax errors, spatial population weighting and selected calibration samples. Uniform spatial density gives locally, hence on the physically valid range. More distant objects can scatter into a measured-parallax cut. In addition, inversion is nonlinear and gives misleading estimates at low signal-to-noise; a negative measured parallax is possible even for a positive true distance. A posterior instead combines the parallax likelihood with a justified population prior. An unbounded uniform-volume prior is improper here; a finite population model or a proper distance prior for parallax inference is necessary.[ref]
Bayes' theorem makes the assumptions explicit. If denotes population parameters, latent properties and the catalogue inclusion event, a selected-sample likelihood has the form
This selection-normalized astronomical likelihood accounts for the model-dependent probability of entering the catalogue. For individual inference, selection information already determined by the fully conditioned measured data must not be multiplied in a second time. The sampling design, inferential target and actual conditioned information determine the appropriate expression.
Other effects include Eddington bias, where steep number counts and measurement scatter move more faint objects upward than bright objects downward, and surface-brightness selection that misses diffuse galaxies despite substantial total flux. Dust extinction affects both detectability and inferred luminosity. Variable-source detection depends on cadence and duration; spectroscopic follow-up can favor easy-to-measure redshifts or particular colors. Blends, calibration drift and redshift errors can mimic population changes.
Examples include magnitude-limited supernova samples used in distance-redshift fits, where luminosity scatter and follow-up must be modeled, and radial-velocity planet surveys, which favor large-amplitude, short-period systems and leave inclination degeneracies. Forward modeling through the survey pipeline, injection-and-recovery estimates of completeness, calibrated noise and properly modeled censored or nondetected observations address these effects. A universal correction or an unexamined inverse-volume weight does not replace an explicit generative and selection model.
The detector is intended for arcsecond-scale astronomical seeing, rather than the telescope's diffraction limit. A circular aperture of this area has diameter , giving a Rayleigh criterion angle about arcsec at the observing wavelength. One-arcsecond pixels conventionally sample an astronomical seeing profile of roughly two arcseconds across with two samples; a one-arcsecond profile would be undersampled. The pixel scale alone does not determine an exact astronomical seeing width.
Use the supplied surface brightness as radiative flux integrated over the photometric passband: its units contain no inverse hertz. Treat as the representative photon energy, and assume unit throughput and quantum efficiency. A genuinely frequency-specific brightness would require a bandwidth. With angles measured consistently in arcseconds, an annulus has area square arcseconds, so
This is flux per collecting area; collected energy is . There is no extra conversion to steradians when both brightness and angular area use square arcseconds.
For Poisson photon counting, a pixel with expected count has energy and standard deviation . Thus the local four-sigma rule gives , or 16 photons at the boundary. With pixel area ,
Consequently arcsec and
Integrating to the model's outer radius arcsec instead gives
The pixel cut retains 51.6% of this total. It is an imposed isophotal photometry rule, not a fundamental limit: averaging annuli or fitting a justified profile can recover signal below the per-pixel cut.
Figure 1.
Original photon-counting profile and fraction of total flux inside the imposed detection radius
. Details.
In practice, sky background photons add shot noise even after subtraction of the mean sky. read noise, dark current, imperfect flat-field correction, throughput calibration and atmospheric extinction also matter. At large radius the dominant uncertainty can be a tiny error in the sky level, scattered light or the wings of the point spread function, rather than source photon statistics. Mask foreground stars and background objects, compare blank-sky regions and dithered exposures, and check profile recovery by inserting artificial extended sources. astronomical seeing and finite pixels convolve the intrinsic profile; model that response when extrapolating the total.
The luminosity convergence of an outer surface-brightness profile follows directly: contributes , hence at large radius for . For either shallow index considered, ever larger annuli dominate: extending the law to infinity gives an unphysical divergent luminosity. Such a law must eventually steepen or truncate. Over a finite range, however, substantial light can lie below a surface-brightness selection threshold and be mistaken for sky. This biases galaxy luminosities, the luminosity function and the inferred diffuse light budget; distant diffuse galaxies become especially incomplete because bolometric cosmological surface-brightness dimming scales as . An assumed finite-aperture total is therefore a model-dependent quantity.
The observed population is the parent population filtered by an astronomical selection function and measurement errors. Malmquist bias arises because a flux-limited galaxy selection admits luminous objects from larger volumes: in Euclidean space and . Thus observed luminosity counts are weighted by . Even a nominal standard candle with intrinsic scatter is preferentially observed on its bright side near the limit; ignoring this can underestimate distances. A volume-limited sample or a justified weighting helps, subject to completeness, geometry and evolution assumptions. Separately, Eddington bias occurs when noise scatters a steeply rising population across a detection threshold: more faint objects enter than bright objects leave.
Lutz-Kelker bias concerns noisy stellar parallaxes and population/selection weighting. Locally uniform spatial density gives and, by changing variables, over the model's valid finite range. More distant stars are available to scatter into a parallax-limited sample than nearby stars to scatter out. Inverting an uncertain parallax also introduces a distinct nonlinear-estimation problem. There is no universal magnitude correction for every star: spatial density, luminosity, extinction and how the sample was selected all matter. The classical treatment motivates this issue; it should not replace an explicit generative model.[ref]
Bayes' theorem combines the measurement likelihood function with a justified prior distribution. For example, with a Gaussian parallax error and consistent distance/parallax units,
A proper distance prior for parallax inference might have with a justified scale ; extending to infinity gives an improper posterior here. Negative measured parallaxes remain valid noisy data. For selection conditioning in Bayesian inference, distinguish individual inference from population inference: if selection is determined entirely by the exact data already conditioned on, it adds no further information about that individual's parameters. For population parameters , the selected-data likelihood must instead include the detection normalization . Applying a cut twice is also an error.
Selection can depend on surface brightness, angular resolution, dust, sky coverage, colour and observing cadence as well as total flux. Crowding and unresolved binaries bias distance calibrators. Transit surveys favour large planets and short periods, with an additional geometric transit probability approximately for small planets on circular orbits; injection/recovery tests quantify the remaining transit survey completeness. Cluster catalogues select noisy mass proxies from a steep abundance distribution. Planck's 2013 SZ catalogue explicitly characterized detection completeness and reliability rather than identifying every detection with an unbiased mass census.[ref] Calibrators, artificial-source tests and a forward model of detection, measurement and follow-up are the practical checks on any correction.
Delay-compensated geometry. Choose an east-west baseline vector and let the upward unit vector be . A ray direction at zenith angle in their plane has . Its signed geometric path difference is . Removing the phase-centre delay leaves the residual path
With the receiver ordering chosen to give positive phase for this path, a complex correlator measures
The reverse ordering complex-conjugates the expression without changing its information. A single real multiplier supplies its cosine component; the stated exponential represents an in-phase/quadrature correlator. Equal cable lengths to the central correlator remove a fixed instrumental difference but do not remove the changing geometric delay. Pointing the antennas and electronically compensating the path are separate operations.
Figure 1.
Original east-west interferometer geometry and normalized visibility of a centred one-dimensional uniform source
. Details.
Resolved uniform source. Contributions from mutually incoherent sky elements add as brightness-weighted complex visibilities. Put over and zero elsewhere, and define . Integrating gives
Therefore
The zero-argument value is defined by continuity as one. Normalization by isolates the visibility shape from total flux. The first null occurs when the source spans one fringe period, . A negative real visibility beyond a null is a phase reversal, not negative surface brightness.
Path-compensation precision. A finite observing band sets a coherence envelope. For a rectangular band of width , an uncorrected residual delay multiplies the correlation by
Coarse delay steps must leave if decorrelation is to be small. Thus a coarse path-step scale must be well below the coherence length , with the precise bound determined by the tolerated amplitude loss and maximum quantization residual. A digital fine-delay or phase-rotation system can separately correct the central-frequency phase.
If there is no such carrier-phase correction, the steps must also be a small fraction of to avoid large untracked phase jumps or time-averaging loss. For a step rounded to the nearest setting, and the maximum carrier-phase error is . Bandwidth controls coarse group-delay decorrelation; wavelength controls the precision of untracked carrier phase. No numerical delay step can be inferred from the central frequency alone without a bandwidth, loss tolerance and compensation architecture. Earth rotation additionally sets how rapidly the delay setting must be updated.
Largest sampled angular scale. For a near-zenith view take the shortest projected baseline as . At , . The inverse shortest spatial frequency gives
This is an order-of-magnitude largest fringe scale. A convention defining maximum recoverable source size as would instead give about arcminutes; source profile, weighting and projected baseline coverage determine the operational value. The antenna diameter and primary beam can further restrict the usable field but were explicitly neglected in the source's initial idealization. Ten antennas supply pairwise baselines; their number improves sampling and sensitivity, not the inverse-shortest-baseline scale by a factor of ten. The longest baseline is not supplied, so the finest synthesized resolution is not numerically fixed.
A suitable observing programme. A compact centimetre-wave array is well suited to CMB temperature anisotropy on degree to sub-degree scales sampled by its baselines, and, with sufficiently long baselines and suitable foreground control, thermal Sunyaev-Zeldovich structure in galaxy clusters. At the thermal Sunyaev-Zeldovich signal is a decrement relative to the CMB. The compact baselines retain sensitivity to extended brightness features; the spatial frequencies measured by each baseline have a direct statistical interpretation in CMB analysis.
Compared with lower radio frequencies, synchrotron foregrounds are generally reduced, while thermal dust rises toward higher frequencies; observing near this centimetre-wave atmospheric window is therefore useful, although foregrounds are not absent. Correlation and phase switching reject mean uncorrelated receiver offsets and some instrumental drifts. Receiver thermal noise still contributes variance, and atmosphere, ground pickup or cross-talk can be correlated and require control. Additional long baselines can identify compact radio-source contaminants for subtraction, but the question does not specify enough array geometry to guarantee that capability. There is no zero baseline in ordinary pairwise cross-correlation, so the array does not directly measure the sky monopole or arbitrary larger-scale smooth emission.
In a CCD, absorbed optical photons create photoelectrons collected in electrostatic wells beneath gate electrodes. During readout, clock voltages move the charge packets row by row into a serial register; serial clocks move them one pixel at a time to an output node. The node converts charge to a voltage, approximately , which is amplified and digitized. pixel addresses are recovered from the row and serial-clock sequence. Resetting and sampling the output between packets establishes the baseline. Efficient transfer preserves charge; trapping or incomplete transfer produces loss and trailing. This is CCD clocked charge transfer, not independent wiring of an amplifier to every imaging pixel.[ref]
dark current is thermally generated charge accumulated even without illumination. If its mean rate is electrons per pixel per second, a single exposure adds mean and Poisson variance . Cooling the detector and using low-defect material suppresses this generation. A dark calibration removes the reproducible mean pattern, but cannot remove the dark electrons' random shot noise in the science exposure. read noise comes from measuring the output packet and resetting the sense node, amplifiers and electronics; write its rms as electrons per read. correlated double sampling reduces reset and correlated offsets by subtracting the baseline measurement from the signal measurement. Low-noise electronics and an appropriate slower readout reduce the remaining contribution. The CCD noise budget for separate exposures combined over total time contains independent dark and read contributions , not . Long exposures reduce repeated read noise, but saturation, cosmic rays and tracking requirements constrain the exposure length. On-chip binning can reduce read-noise penalties for a fixed binned area at the cost of angular sampling.
For the source and sky calculation, define the count conversion factor and the source flux per pixel . The ideal source and background electron counts are and . These assume unit throughput and quantum efficiency, approximately constant quantities across the band and a well-determined mean sky level from many background pixels. Source and sky photons have independent Poisson fluctuations, so the variance after subtracting that mean sky is . Subtracting a background removes its mean, not its photon noise. Therefore
Thus the required expression follows directly from adding photon-count variances. Finite sky-estimation noise, dark current and read noise would add further variance. A nonunit common efficiency replaces by the effective collecting area; a nonflat spectrum requires the corresponding frequency integral. For example, estimating the sky from one equally exposed background pixel would add an extra , whereas a large sky region makes that extra term small.
With and the supplied photon frequency, the sky flux per pixel is . Multiplying arcsecond-squared pixel area by brightness per arcsecond squared already gives a flux: no additional steradian conversion belongs in this product. Rearranging gives
Using yields
Table 1.
Ideal per-pixel source and sky rates and exposure divided by squared signal-to-noise ratio
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Source rate per pixel Sky rate per pixel
The first case is mainly source-shot-noise limited, while the last is strongly sky limited. At high source brightness ; at low source brightness it approaches . Reducing source flux by ten can therefore require nearly a hundred times the exposure once sky noise dominates. These are per-pixel values for the ideal model, not guaranteed integration times including calibration, cosmic rays or read noise.
Increasing the diameter increases both source and sky photon rates as for fixed angular pixels. In this ideal limit the required exposure decreases as , whereas the stated telescope cost increases as : collecting area grows only as cost to the power . A larger ground telescope does not remove atmospheric photons or recover arbitrary wavefront information lost in a long seeing-limited exposure. Space observations avoid atmospheric airglow, weather and atmospheric turbulence, and offer stable high-resolution imaging and access to very faint structure. They still have zodiacal light, instrumental backgrounds and their own calibration limits. adaptive optics can provide excellent ground-based resolution in suitable fields, but its guide-star, wavelength and field-dependent limitations do not remove the need for space-based continuum imaging. The need is for complementary low-background, stable and high-resolution measurements; the cost exponent alone is not a proof that every imaging programme is cheaper in space.
For X rays, one fully absorbed photon produces many electron-hole pairs in silicon, rather than one optical photoelectron count. At moderate surface brightness, the probability of two photons landing in the same event island during one CCD frame is small. The charge packet or sum over neighbouring split-event pixels then supplies a pulse height for each photon, while its pixel position supplies the image coordinate. Calibrating pulse height against energy produces an event list from which a spectrum can be accumulated for any spatial region. photon pile-up at larger occupancies merges photon energies and corrupts both spectra and event grades, so fast enough frames and event-pattern screening are essential.[ref]
A measured silicon pair-creation energy gives electrons for a photon. Let be the Fano factor of pair production, the number of independently read pixels in the event sum, and the rms read noise per pixel. Then
The Fano-limited X-ray CCD energy resolution using the representative silicon value gives an ideal Fano-limited at , or resolving power . Finite read noise, charge loss and event summing broaden this; an order-of-magnitude practical estimate is a few tenths of a keV, but the particular detector's value is not determined by the given optical-pixel parameters. These and values are external detector properties, not supplied question data. Treating every pair as independent Poisson production instead would give rms, or FWHM; stating which width is meant avoids conflating those estimates. Radiation-induced charge-transfer inefficiency requires additional gain and spectral-response calibration.[ref]
Spatial geometry. An embedding of the three-sphere is
Taking differentials and collecting terms gives the induced metric tensor
Put . Then , so
The areal radius is not a global radial coordinate on the entire three-sphere: its maximum occurs at the equator and two hemispheres share each smaller value. Use separate charts there; the coordinate singularity at is not a physical singularity.
For Euclidean space and hyperbolic space of curvature , respectively,
For the latter, gives . In all three cases the induced two-metric at fixed is . Its surface area is therefore
This equality compares the same areal radius, not the same proper radial distance. For a proper radial distance , the corresponding areas are , , and .
Homogeneity, isotropy and redshift. The FRW metric has constant-time spatial slices of constant curvature , with selecting the three geometries above. Their isometries act transitively on points and isotropically about every point, implementing the cosmological principle. Multiplication by one common time-dependent scale factor preserves these properties. With the source's normalization, is dimensionless and has units of length; using a dimensionless scale factor instead rescales the spatial curvature parameter. The origin of the spherical coordinates is arbitrary; it does not identify a physical centre. Cosmic time is the proper time of the comoving observers, and the absence of time-space cross terms makes their worldlines orthogonal to the homogeneous slices.
For a radial null geodesic between comoving endpoints,
The next wave crest travels between the same endpoints. Subtracting the two path integrals, for wave periods short compared with the expansion time, gives . Thus the cosmological redshift is
Both observers' clocks are cosmic proper-time clocks. Peculiar velocities and local gravitational-potential shifts have been left out of this homogeneous calculation.
Angular size and brightness. For a galaxy small compared with its distance, the angular diameter distance is and its angular diameter is
Here the emitted proper diameter is measured transverse to the line of sight; radial proper distance is a different integral when . Ignoring absorption, lensing caustics and intrinsic evolution, photon-number conservation spreads an isotropic-equivalent luminosity across the sphere . Each photon loses energy by , and its arrival interval is stretched by the same factor. The received bolometric flux is
The disc's proper projected area is , and its observed solid angle is . Therefore its surface brightness is
This is cosmological surface-brightness dimming. The normalization uses as isotropic-equivalent luminosity along the viewing direction; another disc emission law changes that normalization but not the redshift power. This is a bolometric result. In a specified observed frequency band the emitted spectrum is sampled at a shifted frequency and requires a spectral correction.
The distinction in telescope aperture and resolved surface brightness matters here. A larger telescope collects more photons and improves angular resolution, but cannot restore the incoming radiance lost by cosmological dimming. For aperture diameter and a diffraction resolution element of solid angle , the collected power from uniform resolved brightness scales as
independent of . This is consistent with conservation of etendue. It explains why increasing aperture while keeping every gain in resolution does not increase counts per native resolution element from a smooth extended source. It does not make larger telescopes useless: at a fixed angular bin the counts grow as , so a photon-noise-limited or uniform-sky-noise-limited signal-to-noise ratio grows roughly as . They also resolve smaller structures and improve point-source sensitivity. Aperture, exposure and angular binning help measure a dim galaxy, without changing its intrinsic brightness penalty.
Figure 1.
Cosmological surface-brightness dimming and the distinct aperture scalings of fixed angular bins and diffraction elements
. Details.
Let and use the velocity-anisotropy parameter , with . Here the tangential variance is per component; a definition using the sum of both tangential variances instead has an extra factor of two. The original PDF has this correct per-component ratio, which the TeX corrupts.
At a point along the line of sight, . The radial direction makes an angle with the sightline satisfying . Spherical symmetry eliminates mixed moments, and projection gives
Using both sides of the galaxy and ,
For this formula use as the projected density of the same tracer represented by . If is a mass density and an observed surface brightness, a constant mass-to-light ratio rescales by that factor; otherwise replace by the luminosity density throughout the tracer equation. The gravitating remains the total mass, not necessarily the tracer's mass.
The Spherical Jeans equation is . Eliminate from the projected integrand:
Rearranging proves
No constancy of was needed. Convergence of the projected moments and the steady spherical assumptions are required. This is the integral form of the projected spherical Jeans residual.
Although has disappeared explicitly, the unknown radial pressure still carries the orbital information. Thus the identity does not remove the mass--anisotropy--density degeneracy: projected brightness and one projected second moment do not uniquely determine both and the radial/tangential partition. A central rise in velocity dispersion can reflect a compact central mass, radial orbital bias, or a changing mass-to-light ratio; flattening and departures from equilibrium add further ambiguities.
For example, within a point-mass-dominated region with tracer and constant , direct solution gives . For the projected velocity dispersion of a Keplerian cusp is
The beta function factors come from setting in the integrals along the line of sight. Different allowed generally change the mass needed to fit the same normalization; is a special cancellation, not the general case. Resolving the central black-hole sphere of influence and constraining orbital structure with higher velocity moments or additional kinematic directions strengthens a compact-mass inference. Brightness and velocity dispersion profiles alone do not establish a unique central black-hole mass, still less an event horizon.