Searching for Hyper-compact star clusters in the Milky Way using LAMOST and Gaia

Hao Wu, Haibo Yuan, Yilun Wang, Zexi Niu, Huawei Zhang

Published 2024-04-12Version 1

During the early merger of the Milky Way, intermediate-mass black holes in merged dwarf galaxies may have been ejected from the center of their host galaxies due to gravitational waves, carrying some central stars along. This process can lead to the formation of hyper-compact star clusters, potentially hosting black holes in the mass range of $10^4$ to $10^5$ solar masses. These clusters are crucial targets for identifying and investigating intermediate-mass black holes. However, no hyper-compact star clusters in the Milky Way have been identified so far. In this paper, taking advantage of the high spatial resolution power of Gaia, we used data from Gaia EDR3 and LAMOST DR7, along with additional data from Pan-STARRS and SDSS, to conduct an initial screening of 6,138,049 sources using various parameters of Gaia EDR3. A total of 4,786 sources were selected for in-depth analysis. Each of these sources was meticulously scrutinized by examining their images, spectra, and nearby celestial objects to exclude various false positives, such as contaminations, galaxies, wide binaries, or wrong matches. We finally identified one likely hyper-compact star cluster candidate in the Milky Way, laying the foundation for further high-resolution imaging and spectral verification.