Addendum: Hubble Space Telescope Evidence for an Intermediate-Mass Black Hole in the Globular Cluster M15. II. Kinematic Analysis and Dynamical Modeling [Astron. J. 124, 3270 (2002)]
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In Paper II, we reported the existence of a dark and compact mass component near the center of M15, based on an analysis of new data from the Hubble Space Telescope . Possible explanations for this mass component include (1) a single, intermediate-mass black hole (BH) and (2) a collection of dark remnants (e.g., neutron stars) that have sunk to the cluster center because of mass segregation. We assessed the plausibility of the latter possibility by comparing the kinematic data for M15 with the predictions of the most sophisti-cated and most recently published Fokker-Planck models for M15 (Dull et al. 1997, hereafter D97). We showed that the mass-to-light ratio ( M / L ) profile in Figure 12 of D97 implies too few dark remnants near the cluster center to explain the observed kinematics of M15. This supported the view that M15 harbors an intermediate-mass BH. We address here how this conclusion is affected by the recent discovery of an error in Figure 12 of D97. We show that the presence of an intermediate-mass BH continues to be a viable interpretation