English

How black holes shape globular clusters: Modeling NGC 3201

High Energy Astrophysical Phenomena 2018-03-21 v1

Abstract

Numerical simulations have shown that black holes (BHs) can strongly influence the evolution and present-day observational properties of globular clusters (GCs). Using a Monte Carlo code, we construct GC models that match the Milky Way (MW) cluster NGC 3201, the first cluster in which a stellar-mass BH was identified through radial-velocity measurements. We predict that NGC 3201 contains 200\gtrsim 200 stellar-mass BHs. Furthermore, we explore the dynamical formation of main sequence-BH binaries and demonstrate that systems similar to the observed BH binary in NGC 3201 are produced naturally. Additionally, our models predict the existence of bright blue-straggler-BH binaries unique to core-collapsed clusters, which otherwise retain few BHs.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.1802.09553,
  title  = {How black holes shape globular clusters: Modeling NGC 3201},
  author = {Kyle Kremer and Claire S. Ye and Sourav Chatterjee and Carl L. Rodriguez and Frederic A. Rasio},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1802.09553},
  year   = {2018}
}

Comments

Accepted for publication in ApJL. Comments welcome

R2 v1 2026-06-23T00:34:11.172Z