A Chandra survey of milky way globular clusters - III. Searching for X-ray signature of intermediate-mass black holes

Globular clusters (GCs) arc thought to harbor the long-sought population of intermediate-mass black holes (IMBHs). We present a systematic search for a putative IMBH in 81 Milky Way GCs, based on archival Chandra X-ray observations. We find in only six GCs a significant X-ray source positionally coincident with the cluster centre, which have 0.5-8 keV luminosities between similar to 1 x 10(30) erg s(-1) and similar to 4 x 10(33) erg s(-1). However, the spectral and temporal properties of these six sources can also be explained in terms of binary stars. The remaining 75 GCs do not have a detectable central source, most with 3a upper limits ranging between 10(29-32) erg s(-1) over 0.5-8 keV, which are significantly lower than predicted for canonical Bondi accretion. To help understand the feeble X-ray signature, we perform hydrodynamic simulations of stellar wind accretion on to a 1000 M-circle dot IMBH from the most-bound orbiting star, for stellar wind properties consistent with either a main-sequence (MS) star or an asymptotic giant branch (AGB) star. We find that the synthetic X-ray luminosity for the MS case (similar to 10(19) erg s(-1)) is far below the current X-ray limits. The predicted X-ray luminosity for the AGB case (similar to 10(34) erg s(-1)), on the other hand, is compatible with the detected central X-ray sources, in particular the ones in Terzan 5 and NGC 6652. However, the probability of having an AGB star as the most-bound star around the putative IMBH is very low. Our study strongly suggests that it is very challenging to detect the accretion-induced X-ray emission from IMBHs, even if they were prevalent in present-day GCs.