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Recently, twin-peak quasi-periodic oscillations (QPOs) have been observed in a 3 : 2 ratio for three Galactic black hole microquasars with frequencies that have been shown to scale as 1/ M , as expected for general relativisitic motion near a black hole. It may be possible to extend this result to distinguish between the following two disparate models that have been proposed for the puzzling ultraluminous X-ray sources (ULXs): (1) an intermediate-mass black hole ( M ~ 10 3 M ☉ ) radiating very near the Eddington limit and (2) a conventional black hole ( M ~10 M ☉ ) accreting at a highly super-Eddington rate with its emission beamed along the rotation axis. We suggest that one could discriminate between these models by detecting the counterpart of a Galactic twin-peak QPO in a ULX: the expected frequency for the intermediate-mass black hole model is only about 1 Hz, whereas for the conventional black hole model the expected frequency would be the ~100 Hz value observed for the Galactic microquasars.
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Abramowicz et al. (2004) studied this question.
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