HST's hunt for intermediate-mass black holes in star clusters

Abstract

Establishing or ruling out, either through solid mass measurements or upper limits, the presence of intermediate-mass black holes (IMBHs) at the centers of star clusters would profoundly impact our understanding of problems ranging from the formation and long-term dynamical evolution of stellar systems, to the nature of the seeds and the growth mechanisms of supermassive black holes. While there are sound theoretical arguments both for and against their presence in today's clusters, observational studies have so far not yielded truly conclusive IMBH detections nor upper limits. We argue that the most promising approach to solving this issue is provided by the combination of measurements of the proper motions of stars at the centers of Galactic globular clusters and dynamical models able to take full advantage of this type of data set. We present a program based on HST observations and recently developed tools for dynamical analysis designed to do just that.

7 pages; Invited talk at IAU Symposium 266 "Star clusters: basic galactic building blocks" (Rio de Janeiro, 10-14 August 2009), R. de Grijs and R.D. Lepine, eds; v2 reflects a better citation of some references and corrected typos

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Cited by in corpus (2)

• Exploring intermediate and massive black-hole binaries with the Einstein Telescope
• Investigating the retention of intermediate-mass black holes in star clusters using N-body simulations