Student or educator? Sign up with your school email and get 6 months of Pro free.
CoChat
Sign Up
Cited by 731

The DOI matches its Crossref record; 34 of the 34 references it cites were found in a registry or an index.

Formation of massive black holes through runaway collisions in dense young star clusters

Open access
Portegies Zwart, Simon F., Baumgardt, Holger, Hut, Piet, Makino, Junichiro, McMillan, Stephen L. W.·2004·Nature
DOI 10.1038/nature02448
Open this paper in CoChat — free account

Abstract

A luminous X-ray source is associated with MGG 11—a cluster of young stars ∼200 pc from the centre of the starburst galaxy M 82 (refs 1, 2). The properties of this source are best explained by invoking a black hole with a mass of at least 350 solar masses (350 M[circdot]), which is intermediate between stellar-mass and supermassive black holes. A nearby but somewhat more massive cluster (MGG 9) shows no evidence of such an intermediate-mass black hole, raising the issue of just what physical characteristics of the clusters can account for this difference. Here we report numerical simulations of the evolution and motion of stars within the clusters, where stars are allowed to merge with each other. We find that for MGG 11 dynamical friction leads to the massive stars sinking rapidly to the centre of the cluster, where they participate in a runaway collision. This produces a star of 800–3,000 M[circdot], which ultimately collapses to a black hole of intermediate mass. No such runaway occurs in the cluster MGG 9, because the larger cluster radius leads to a mass segregation timescale a factor of five longer than for MGG 11.

Overview

The claims and statistics of this paper haven’t been checked yet.

Run the check — free, no account needed. It reads the open-access text and checks the sources it cites.

A few free checks a day · papers already verified open instantly · results are public

Integrity signals

Registry

Crossref · 10.1038/nature02448

Cites

34 of 34 references verified0 citation errors · 0 not checkable

Statistics

Verification

Claims the paper makes

The claims and statistics of this paper haven’t been checked yet.

Run the check — free, no account needed. It reads the open-access text and checks the sources it cites.

A few free checks a day · papers already verified open instantly · results are public

Self-check

Percentages, sums and reported differences re-computed from the paper’s own numbers.

The self-check needs the paper’s full text.

Citations

Cites

Show all 34 references

Cited by

See all 731

Metadata

Authors
Portegies Zwart, S. F., Baumgardt, H., Hut, P., Makino, J., & McMillan, S. L. W.
Venue
Nature
Publisher
Springer Science and Business Media LLC
Published
2004-04
Volume
428
Issue
6984
Pages
724-726
ISSN
  • 0028-0836 (ISSN-L)
  • 1476-4687
DOI
10.1038/nature02448
OpenAlex
W2039954136
Cited by
731
References
34
FWCI
27.18
Type
journal article
Language
en
Open access
green

About these checks

Registry, retraction, Cites and statistics results are computed, not judged, with one exception: a printed reference that no index lists is read once by a model before it counts as a citation error. Claims are extracted by a model and kept only when their quote appears verbatim in the text; each cited source is then checked, with a model’s help, for whether it says what the claim relies on. Those verdicts can be wrong — read the claim’s quote and the cited source before relying on one.

Statistics and arithmetic are recomputed, not judged.

Confidence bands are shown only for fields calibrated on our annotated test set. None is calibrated yet, so no band is shown.

What counts as a claim ›How we measure confidence ›How we check this ›

Are you an author, or do you see a problem with this page? Request a review

How to cite

Cite CoChat for the checks on this page, and the paper for its own findings.

This page
CoChat. (2026). Citation check: Formation of massive black holes through runaway collisions in dense young star clusters. https://app.cochat.ai/papers/10.1038/nature02448
The paper
Portegies Zwart, S. F., Baumgardt, H., Hut, P., Makino, J., & McMillan, S. L. W. (2004). Formation of massive black holes through runaway collisions in dense young star clusters. Nature. https://doi.org/10.1038/nature02448

Data sources

Bibliographic data: Semantic Scholar, OpenAlex, Crossref.

Contains information from the Semantic Scholar Academic Graph Datasets, made available under the ODC Attribution License (ODC-BY 1.0).

Semantic Scholar’s data is described in: Kinney, R., et al. (2023). The Semantic Scholar Open Data Platform. arXiv:2301.10140.