Addendum: "Hubble Space Telescope Evidence for an Intermediate-Mass Black Hole in the Globular Cluster M15: II. Kinematical Analysis and Dynamical Modeling"

Preprint
Publisher Website
Google Scholar
Abstract
It has been reported that there is an error in the figure in Dull et al. (1997, D97) that shows the radial M/L profile in Fokker-Planck models of M15. We discuss how this modifies the interpretation of our kinematical data. These imply the existence of a dark and compact mass component near the center of M15, either a single black hole (BH) or a collection of dark remnants that have sunk to the cluster center due to mass segregation. We previously showed that the latter interpretation is in conflict with the D97 M/L profile, which supported the BH interpretation. We repeat our analysis here with the corrected D97 profile. Models without a BH are now found to be statistically acceptable (within 1-sigma), although inclusion of a BH still provides a marginally better fit. It does not necessarily follow that dark remnants are now the preferred interpretation of the data. The D97 models, as well as N-body models by Baumgardt et al. (2002), assume that all neutron stars are retained during cluster evolution. This conflicts with predictions of the neutron-star retention rate (typically below 10 per cent) based on pulsar kick velocities. The presence of a single BH therefore continues to be a viable interpretation of the data. The best fit BH mass with the corrected D97 M/L profile is M_BH = 1.7^{+2.7}_{-1.7} x 10^3 solar masses, and with a constant M/L it is M_BH = 3.2^{+2.2}_{-2.2} x 10^3 solar masses. A model that includes both neutron star escape and mass segregation would probably yield a value between these numbers. This agrees with the correlation between velocity dispersion and BH mass inferred for galaxies. However, with the presently available models and data it is neither uniquely implied nor ruled out that M15 has an intermediate-mass BH.

This publication has 0 references indexed in Scilit: