The Supermassive Black Hole at the Heart of Centaurus A: Revealed by
  Gas- and Stellar Kinematics
  At less than 4 Mpc distance the radio galaxy NGC 5128 (Centaurus A) is the
prime example to study the supermassive black hole and its influence on the
environment in great detail. To model and understand the feeding and feedback
mechanisms one needs an accurate determination of the mass of the supermassive
black hole. The aim of this review is to give an overview of the recent studies
that have been dedicated to measure the black hole mass in Centaurus A from
both gas and stellar kinematics. It shows how the advancement in observing
techniques and instrumentation drive the field of black hole mass measurements
and concludes that adaptive optics assisted integral field spectroscopy is the
key to identify the effects of the AGN on the surrounding ionised gas. Using
data from SINFONI at the ESO Very Large Telescope, the best-fit black hole mass
is M_BH=4.5 +1.7/-1.0 x 10^7 Msolar (from H_2 kinematics) and M_BH= (5.5 +/-
3.0) x 10^7 Msolar (from stellar kinematics; both with 3 sigma errors). This is
one of the cleanest gas vs star comparison of a M_BH determination, and brings
Centaurus A into agreement with the M_BH-sigma relation.
