Finding faint intermediate-mass black holes in the radio band

Abstract

We discuss the prospects for detecting faint intermediate-mass black holes, such as those predicted to exist in the cores of globular clusters and dwarf spheroidal galaxies.We briefly summarize the difficulties of stellar dynamical searches, then show that recently discovered relations between black hole mass, X-ray luminosity and radio luminosity imply that in most cases, these black holes should be more easily detected in the radio than in the X-rays. Finally, we show upper limits from some radio observations of globular clusters, and discuss the possibility that the radio source in the core of the Ursa Minor dwarf spheroidal galaxy might be a ∼ 10,000–100,000 M⊙ black hole.