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Establishing or ruling out, either through solid mass measurements or upper limits, the presence of intermediate-mass black holes (IMBHs) at the centers of star clusters would profoundly impact our understanding of problems ranging from the formation and long-term dynamical evolution of stellar systems, to the nature of the seeds and the growth mechanisms of supermassive black holes. While there are sound theoretical arguments both for and against their presence in todays clusters, observational studies have so far not yielded truly conclusive IMBH detections nor upper limits. We argue that the most promising approach to solving this issue is provided by the combination of measurements of the proper motions of stars at the centers of Galactic globular clusters and dynamical models able to take full advantage of this type of data set. We present a program based on HST observations and recently developed tools for dynamical analysis designed to do just that.
Intermediate mass black holes (IMBHs), with masses between 100 to 10^5 M_odot, represent the link between stellar mass black holes and the supermassive black holes that reside in galaxy centers. While IMBHs are crucial to our understanding of black h
Intermediate-mass black holes (IMBHs) could form via runaway merging of massive stars in a young massive star cluster (YMC). We combine a suite of numerical simulations of YMC formation with a semi-analytic model for dynamical friction and merging of
Collisions were suggested to potentially play a role in the formation of massive stars in present day clusters, and have likely been relevant during the formation of massive stars and intermediate mass black holes within the first star clusters. In t
For a sample of nine Galactic globular clusters we measured the inner kinematic profiles with integral-field spectroscopy that we combined with existing outer kinematic measurements and HST luminosity profiles. With this information we are able to de
Current theoretical models predict a mass gap with a dearth of stellar black holes (BHs) between roughly $50,M_odot$ and $100,M_odot$, while, above the range accessible through massive star evolution, intermediate-mass BHs (IMBHs) still remain elusiv