No evidence for intermediate-mass black holes in the globular clusters ω Cen and NGC 6624

We compare the results of a large grid of N-body simulations with the surface brightness and velocity dispersion profiles of the globular clusters omega Cen and NGC 6624. Our models include clusters with varying stellar-mass black hole retention fractions and varying masses of a central intermediate-mass black hole (IMBH). We find that an M-circle dot IMBH, whose presence has been suggested based on the measured velocity dispersion profile of omega Cen, predicts the existence of about 20 fast-moving, m > 0.5M(circle dot), main-sequence stars with a (1D) velocity v > 60kms(-1) in the central 20 arcsec of omega Cen. However, no such star is present in the HST/ACS proper motion catalogue of Bellini etal. (2017), strongly ruling out the presence of a massive IMBH in the core of omega Cen. Instead, we find that all available data can be fitted by a model that contains 4.6percent of the mass of omega Cen in a centrally concentrated cluster of stellar-mass black holes. We show that this mass fraction in stellar-mass BHs is compatible with the predictions of stellar evolution models of massive stars. We also compare our grid of N-body simulations with NGC 6624, a cluster recently claimed to harbour a 20000M(circle dot) black hole based on timing observations of millisecond pulsars. However, we find that models with M-IMBH > 1000M(circle dot) IMBHs are incompatible with the observed velocity dispersion and surface brightness profile of NGC 6624, ruling out the presence of a massive IMBH in this cluster. Models without an IMBH provide again an excellent fit to NGC 6624.