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There is a population of stars with velocities in excess of 500 km s$^{-1}$ relative to the Galactic center. Many, perhaps most, of these hyper-velocity stars (HVSs) are B stars, similar to the disk and S stars in a nuclear cluster around a…

Astrophysics of Galaxies · Physics 2021-06-23 Xiaochen Zheng , Douglas N. C. Lin , Shude Mao

The firm co-existence of intermediate-mass black holes (IMBHs, $M_{\rm BH} \approx 10^3-10^6 M_odot$) in nuclear star clusters (NSCs) remains uncertain because the limited number of verified instances within the local Universe, limited…

Astrophysics of Galaxies · Physics 2025-09-04 Hai N Ngo , Dieu D. Nguyen , Truong N. Nguyen , Trung H. Dang , Tien H. T. Ho

During the last decades, much effort has been devoted to explain the discrepancy between the amount of intracluster medium (ICM) estimated from stellar evolution theories and that emerging from observations in globular clusters (GCs). One…

Astrophysics of Galaxies · Physics 2016-07-27 C. Pepe , L. J. Pellizza

It is widely accepted that black holes (BHs) with masses greater than a million solar masses (Msun) lurk at the centres of massive galaxies. The origins of such `supermassive' black holes (SMBHs) remain unknown (Djorgovski et al. 1999),…

Astrophysics of Galaxies · Physics 2017-09-06 Tomoharu Oka , Shiho Tsujimoto , Yuhei Iwata , Mariko Nomura , Shunya Takekawa

In this paper, we study the secular dynamical evolution of binaries composed of intermediate-mass and stellar-mass black holes (IMBHs and SBHs, respectively) in orbit about a central super-massive black hole (SMBH) in galactic nuclei. Such…

Astrophysics of Galaxies · Physics 2018-08-29 Giacomo Fragione , Nathan Leigh

We explore the formation of intermediate mass black holes (IMBHs), potential seeds for supermassive black holes (SMBHs), via runaway stellar collisions for a wide range of star cluster (surface) densities ($4\times10^3 M_\odot$ pc$^{-2}…

We analyzed images of every northern hemisphere Sd galaxy listed in the Third Reference Catalogue of Bright Galaxies (RC3) with a relatively face-on inclination ($\theta\leq30{\deg}$). Specifically, we measured the spiral arms' winding…

The level of mass segregation in the core of globular clusters has been previously proposed as a potential indicator of the dynamical constituents of the system, such as presence of a significant population of stellar-mass black holes…

Astrophysics of Galaxies · Physics 2019-03-27 Ruggero de Vita , Michele Trenti , Morgan MacLeod

Empirical evidence for both stellar mass black holes M_bh<10^2 M_sun) and supermassive black holes (SMBHs, M_bh>10^5 M_sun) is well established. Moreover, every galaxy with a bulge appears to host a SMBH, whose mass is correlated with the…

Astrophysics of Galaxies · Physics 2014-11-20 Margarita Safonova , Prajval Shastri

It is now well established that all galaxies with a massive bulge component harbour a central supermassive black hole (SMBH). The mass of the SMBH correlates with bulge properties such as the bulge mass and the velocity dispersion, which…

Cosmology and Nongalactic Astrophysics · Physics 2015-05-14 Nina Nowak , Jens Thomas , Peter Erwin , Roberto P. Saglia , Ralf Bender , Richard I. Davies

Recent X-ray observations of galaxies with ROSAT, ASCA, and Chandra have revealed numerous bright off-center point sources which, if isotropic emitters, are likely to be intermediate-mass black holes, with hundreds to thousands of solar…

Astrophysics · Physics 2009-11-07 M. Coleman Miller

We fit axisymmetric 3-integral dynamical models to NGC3379 using the line-of-sight velocity distribution obtained from HST/FOS spectra of the galaxy center and ground-based long-slit spectroscopy along four position angles, with the light…

If binary intermediate-mass black holes (IMBHs; with masses between 100 and $10^4 \Msun$) form in dense stellar clusters, their inspiral will be detectable with the planned Laser Interferometer Space Antenna (LISA) out to several Gpc. Here…

Solar and Stellar Astrophysics · Physics 2014-11-18 Pau Amaro-Seoane , Cole Miller , Marc Freitag

We present a detailed dynamical analysis of the projected density and kinematical data available for the globular cluster Omega Cen. We solve the spherical anisotropic Jeans equation to predict the projected profiles of the RMS velocity in…

Astrophysics of Galaxies · Physics 2010-02-01 Roeland P. van der Marel , Jay Anderson

This paper reviews the subject of intermediate-mass black holes (IMBHs) with masses between those of "stellar-mass" and "super-massive" black holes. The existence of IMBHs is a real possibility: they might plausibly have formed as remnants…

Astrophysics · Physics 2007-05-23 Roeland P. van der Marel

There is growing evidence that intermediate-mass black holes (IMBHs), defined here as having a mass in the range M=500-10^5 Msun, are present in the dense centers of certain globular clusters (GCs). Gravitational waves (GWs) from their…

High Energy Astrophysical Phenomena · Physics 2018-06-20 Ely D. Kovetz , Ilias Cholis , Marc Kamionkowski , Joseph Silk

Globular clusters have been alternatively predicted to host intermediate-mass black holes (IMBHs) or nearly impossible to form and retain them in their centres. Over the last decade enough theoretical and observational evidence have…

Astrophysics · Physics 2015-06-24 Margarita Safonova , C. S. Stalin

Intermediate-mass black holes (IMBH) are expected to exist in globular clusters (GCs) and compact stellar systems (CSS) in general, but none have been conclusively detected. Tidal disruption events (TDEs), where a star is tidally disrupted…

Astrophysics of Galaxies · Physics 2025-06-04 Richard T. Pomeroy , Mark A. Norris

The James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) has revealed a population of dense stellar systems at high redshift, including the "Cosmic Gems" arc ($z \sim 10.2$) and the "Firefly Sparkle" ($z \sim 8.3$). With masses in the range of $10^5$…

Astrophysics of Galaxies · Physics 2026-05-29 Viola Bocchi , Matías Liempi , Dominik R. G. Schleicher

We investigate the population properties of binary black holes (BBHs) from the LIGO-Virgo-KAGRA collaboration, focusing especially on those in the high-mass range, using the newly released GWTC-4 catalog. For the first time, we search for a…

High Energy Astrophysical Phenomena · Physics 2026-05-12 Fan-Xiao-Yu Xia , Yuan-Zhu Wang , Ying Qin