Death of Stellar Baryonic Dark Matter (original) (raw)

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, \(\Omega_{W D} < 3 \times 10^{-3}h^{-1}\), 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.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. University of Michigan, Dept. of Physics, Ann Arbor, MI 48109-1120
    Katherine Freese
  2. Ohio State University, Astronomy Dept., Columbus, OH 43210
    Brian Fields
  3. University of Illinois, Astronomy Dept., Urbana, IL 61801-3080
    David Graff

Authors

  1. Katherine Freese
  2. Brian Fields
  3. David Graff

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Achim Weiss Tom G. Abel Vanessa Hill

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Freese, K., Fields, B., Graff, D. Death of Stellar Baryonic Dark Matter. In: Weiss, A., Abel, T.G., Hill, V. (eds) The First Stars. ESO ASTROPHYSICS SYMPOSIA. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/10719504\_3

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