Extragalactic Teenagers: Searching for Intermediate Mass Black Holes in the Nearby Universe

We now know that binary black holes and Intermediate Mass Black Holes (IMBHs) form thanks to recent observations by LIGO. What we don?t know is how rapidly they grow, how frequently they merge, and whether they represent a step in the evolution of supermassive black holes, although that seems increasingly unlikely. I conduct a volume-limited archival survey of all Chandra X-ray Observatory data that aims to locate and analyze potential IMBH sources within 15 Mpc of the Earth. Here, an IMBH is defined as any black hole whose mass exceeds the threshold where it is likely to form from a single progenitor star. I perform a multiwavelength analysis of the highest-count sources in this sample, in the hope of discovering an intermediate mass black hole. I identify an IMBH candidate in NGC 4631, as well as four candidate super-Eddington neutron stars in other nearby galaxies.