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Science 28 January 2005:
Vol. 307. no. 5709, pp. 533 - 534
DOI: 10.1126/science.1107110
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Perspectives

ASTRONOMY:
The Hunt for Intermediate-Mass Black Holes

Giuseppina Fabbiano

Two types of black holes-stellar black holes and supermassive black holes-are known to exist in the universe. This leaves a large gap in the black hole mass distribution. In her Perspective, Fabbiano investigates whether ultraluminous x-ray sources may be the missing intermediate-mass black holes. She concludes that the evidence is inconclusive; most ultraluminous x-ray sources can be explained without resorting to the intermediate-mass black hole hypothesis, but some of the brightest sources may indeed be intermediate-mass black holes.

The author is at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, Cambridge, MA 02138, USA. E-mail: pepi{at}head.cfa.harvard.edu

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Science. ISSN 0036-8075 (print), 1095-9203 (online)