Speaker
Description
Intermediate-mass black holes, spanning 10²–10⁵ solar masses, are the missing link between stellar-mass and supermassive black holes, and no unambiguous example is known in the Milky Way. We search for intermediate-mass black holes along 83 southern sightlines, using the MeerKAT Pulsar Timing Array 4.5-year data release as an array of independent accelerometers. A free-floating IMBH near a pulsar reveals itself not through gravitational radiation, which at these masses lies far below pulsar timing array sensitivity, but kinematically, through the acceleration it imparts. We identify the binary orbital period derivative as the sensitive channel and present anomalous line-of-sight accelerations for the MPTA binaries, together with preliminary exclusion regions in the mass–separation plane.