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A luminous X-ray source is associated with a cluster (MGG-11) of young stars ~200pc from the center of the starburst galaxy M82. The properties of the X-ray source are best explained by a black hole with a mass of at least 350Msun, which is intermediate between stellar-mass and supermassive black holes. A nearby but somewhat more massive star cluster (MGG-9) shows no evidence of such an intermediate mass black hole, raising the issue of just what physical characteristics of the clusters can account for this difference. Here we report numerical simulations of the evolution and the motions of stars within the clusters, where stars are allowed to mergers with each other. We find that for MGG-11 dynamical friction leads to the massive stars sinking rapidly to the center of the cluster to participate in a runaway collision, thereby producing a star of 800-3000Msun, which ultimately collapses to an black hole of intermediate mass. No such runaway occurs in the cluster MGG-9 because the larger cluster radius leads to a mass-segregation timescale a factor of five longer than for MGG-11.
A promising mechanism to form intermediate-mass black holes (IMBHs) is the runaway merger in dense star clusters, where main-sequence stars collide and form a very massive star (VMS), which then collapses to a black hole. In this paper we study the e
We study the early dynamical evolution of young, dense star clusters using Monte Carlo simulations for systems with up to N~10^7 stars. Rapid mass segregation of massive main-sequence stars and the development of the Spitzer instability can drive the
We consider spherical stellar clusters with a broad mass function and a relaxation time short enough so that the segregation of massive stars toward the centre occurs before they have time to evolve off the main sequence. The relaxational and collisi
Black holes formed in dense star clusters, where dynamical interactions are frequent, may have fundamentally different properties than those formed through isolated stellar evolution. Theoretical models for single star evolution predict a gap in the
Using Monte Carlo codes, we follow the collisional evolution of clusters in a variety of scenarios. We consider the conditions under which a cluster of main sequence stars may undergo rapid core collapse due to mass segregation, thus entering a phase