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arXiv:astro-ph/0002058astro-ph

Death of Stellar Baryonic Dark Matter

Katherine Freese, Brian D. Field, David S. Graff

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Abstract

The nature of the dark matter in the haloes of galaxies is one of the outstanding questions in astrophysics. All stellar candidates, until recently thought to be likely baryonic contributions to the Halo of our Galaxy, are shown to be ruled out. Faint stars and brown dwarfs are found to constitute only a few percent of the mass of the Galaxy. Stellar remnants, including white dwarfs and neutron stars, are shown to be very constrained as well. High energy gamma-rays observed in HEGRA data place the strongest constraints, $Ω_{WD} < 3 \times 10^{-3} h^{-1}$, where $h$ is the Hubble constant in units of 100 km s$^{-1}$ Mpc$^{-1}$. Hence one is left with several unanswered questions: 1) What are MACHOs seen in microlensing surveys? 2) What is the dark matter in our Galaxy? Indeed a nonbaryonic component in the Halo seems to be required.

arXiv comments
6 pages ps file
Journal reference
Proceedings of "The First Stars", MPA/ESO Workshop, Aug. 4-6, 1999
DOI
doi:10.1007/10719504_3
Subjects
astro-phAstrophysics hep-phHigh Energy Physics, Phenomenology

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    • Black Holes of reasonable can be detected by gravitational lensing. If Black Holes / Brown Dwarfs / etc. were primarily responsible for the dark matter locally, lensing searches would have detected more. See e.g. https://arxiv.org/abs/astro-ph/0002058 for an overview.

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