Finding Faint Intermediate-mass Black Holes in the Radio Band

Abstract

We discuss the prospects for detecting faint intermediate-mass black holes, such as those predicted to exist in the cores of globular clusters and dwarf spheroidal galaxies. We briefly summarize the difficulties of stellar dynamical searches, then show that recently discovered relations between black hole mass, X-ray luminosity and radio luminosity imply that in most cases, these black holes should be more easily detected in the radio than in the X-rays. Finally, we show upper limits from some radio observations of globular clusters, and discuss the possibility that the radio source in the core of the Ursa Minor dwarf spheroidal galaxy might be a $\sim 10,000-100,000M_{\odot }$ black hole.

10 pages, no figures, to appear in From X-ray Binaries to Quasars: Black Hole Accretion on All Mass Scales, ed. T. J. Maccarone, R. P. Fender, and L. C. Ho (Dordrecht: Kluwer)

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Cited by in corpus (9)

• The MAVERIC Survey: Still No Evidence for Accreting Intermediate-mass Black Holes in Globular Clusters
• Radio Emission from the Intermediate-mass Black Hole in the Globular Cluster G1
• VLA Limits for Intermediate Mass Black Holes in Three Globular Clusters
• An Upper Limit on the Mass of a Central Black Hole in the Large Magellanic Cloud from the Stellar Rotation Field
• A Comprehensive Archival Chandra Search for X-ray Emission from Ultracompact Dwarf Galaxies
• XMM-Newton observation of a sample of four close dSph galaxies
• An XMM-Newton search for X-ray sources in the Fornax dwarf galaxy
• Parameterizing the Outflow from a Central Black Hole in Dwarf Spheroidal Galaxies: A 3D Hydrodynamic Simulation
• The XMM-Newton Slew view of IGRJ17361-4441: a transient in the globular cluster NGC 6388