Are Ultra-Luminous X-ray Sources Intermediate Mass Black Holes Accreting from Molecular Clouds?

The origin and nature of Ultra-Luminous X-ray sources (ULXs) is a contentious and controversial topic. There are ongoing debates about the masses of the objects responsible, their sources of mass for accretion, and their relation to stellar populations in galaxies. A new picture of these objects is proposed in which they are intermediate-mass black holes confined to the disks of their host galaxies and accreting from the interstellar medium. They are then preferentially found in or near molecular clouds. This model correctly predicts the shape of the observed luminosity function and requires only a very small fraction of the baryonic mass of a galaxy to be in the form of intermediate-mass black holes. Because the X-rays they produce strongly heat nearby interstellar gas and because they move relatively rapidly in and out of dense regions, ULXs are predicted to have brief episodes of high luminosity, perhaps of order 10^5 yr in duration, but they may recur many times.