Dark matter revealed

Monthly Notices of The Royal Astronomical Society, 2002

The interpretation of the old, cool white dwarfs recently found by Oppenheimer et al. is still controversial. Whereas these authors claim that they have finally found the elusive ancienthalo white dwarf population that contributes significantly to the mass budget of the galactic halo, there have been several other contributions that argue that these white dwarfs are not genuine halo members but, instead, thick-disc stars. We show here that the interpretation of this sample is based on the adopted distances, which are obtained from a colour-magnitude calibration, and we demonstrate that when the correct distances are used a sizeable fraction of these putative halo white dwarfs belong indeed to the disc population. We also perform a maximum likelihood analysis of the remaining set of white dwarfs and we find that they most probably belong to the thick-disc population. However, another possible explanation is that this sample of white dwarfs has been drawn from a 1 : 1 mixture of the halo and disc white dwarf populations.

Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society, 2003

We discuss the recent discovery by Oppenheimer et al. of old, cool white dwarf stars, which may be the first direct detection of Galactic halo dark matter. We argue here that the contribution of more mundane white dwarfs of the stellar halo and thick disc would contribute sufficiently to explain the new high velocity white dwarfs without invoking putative white dwarfs of the dark halo. This by no means rules out that dark matter has been found, but it does constrain the overall contribution by white dwarfs brighter than M R ≈ 16 to significantly less than 1 per cent of the Galactic dark matter. This work confirms a similar study by Reylé, Robin & Crézé.

The Astrophysical Journal, 2001

We present an alternative interpretation of the nature of the extremely cool, high-velocity white dwarfs identified by in a high-latitude astrometric survey. We argue that the velocities of the majority of the sample are more consistent with the high-velocity tail of a rotating population, probably the thick disk, rather than a pressure-supported halo system. Indeed, the observed numbers are well matched by predictions based on the kinematics of a complete sample of nearby M dwarfs. Analysing only stars showing retrograde motion gives a local density close to that expected for white dwarfs in the stellar (R −3.5 ) halo. Under our interpretation, none of the white dwarfs need be assigned to the dark-matter, heavy halo. However, luminosity functions derived from observations of these stars can set important constraints on the age of the oldest stars in the Galactic Disk.

Science, 2001

Based upon the identification of 38 white dwarfs with halo kinematics, in a survey covering 10% of the sky near the south Galactic pole, Oppenheimer et al.

Science, 2001

The Milky Way galaxy contains a large, spherical component which is believed to harbor a substantial amount of unseen matter. Recent observations indirectly suggest that as much as half of this ``dark matter'' may be in the form of old, very cool white dwarfs, the remnants of an ancient population of stars as old as the galaxy itself. We conducted a survey to find faint, cool white dwarfs with large space velocities, indicative of their membership in the galaxy's spherical halo component. The survey reveals a substantial, directly observed population of old white dwarfs, too faint to be seen in previous surveys. This newly discovered population accounts for at least 2 percent of the halo dark matter. It provides a natural explanation for the indirect observations, and represents a direct detection of galactic halo dark matter.

Astronomy & Astrophysics, 2008

The nature of the several microlensing events observed by the MACHO team towards the LMC still remains controversial. Low-mass substellar objects and stars with masses larger than ~1 M_{sun} have been ruled out as major components of a MACHO galactic halo, while stars of half solar masses are the most probable candidates. In this paper we assess jointly the relative contributions of both red dwarfs and white dwarfs to the mass budget of the galactic halo. In doing so we use a Monte Carlo simulator which incorporates up-to-date evolutionary sequences of both red dwarfs and white dwarfs as well as detailed descriptions of our Galaxy and of the LMC. We explore the complete mass range between 0.08 and 1 M_{sun} as possible microlensing candidates and we compare the synthetic populations obtained with our simulator with the results obtained by the MACHO and EROS experiments. Our results indicate that, despite that the contribution of the red dwarf population increases by a factor of 2 the value of the optical depth obtained when taking into account the white dwarf population alone, it is still insufficient to explain the number of events claimed by the MACHO team. Finally, we find that the contribution to the halo dark matter of the whole population under study is smaller than 10% at the 95% conficence level.

Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society, 2012

We apply a new method to determine the local disc matter and dark halo matter density to kinematic and position data for ∼ 2000 K dwarf stars taken from the literature. Our method assumes only that the disc is locally in dynamical equilibrium, and that the 'tilt' term in the Jeans equations is small up to ∼ 1 kpc above the plane. We present a new calculation of the photometric distances to the K dwarf stars, and use a Monte Carlo Markov Chain to marginalise over uncertainties in both the baryonic mass distribution, and the velocity and distance errors for each individual star. We perform a series of tests to demonstrate that our results are insensitive to plausible systematic errors in our distance calibration, and we show that our method recovers the correct answer from a dynamically evolved N-body simulation of the Milky Way. We find a local dark matter density of ρ dm = 0.025 +0.014 −0.013 M pc −3 (0.95 +0.53 −0.49 GeV cm −3 ) at 90% confidence assuming no correction for the non-flatness of the local rotation curve, and ρ dm = 0.022 +0.015 −0.013 M pc −3 (0.85 +0.57 −0.50 GeV cm −3 ) if the correction is included. Our 90% lower bound on ρ dm is larger than the canonical value typically assumed in the literature, and is at mild tension with extrapolations from the rotation curve that assume a spherical halo. Our result can be explained by a larger normalisation for the local Milky Way rotation curve, an oblate dark matter halo, a local disc of dark matter, or some combination of these.

Journal of Cosmology and Astroparticle Physics, 2013

We derive the mass model of the Milky Way (MW), crucial for Dark Matter (DM) direct and indirect detection, using recent data and a cored dark matter (DM) halo profile, which is favoured by studies of external galaxies. The method used consists in fitting a spherically symmetric model of the Galaxy with a Burkert DM halo profile to available data: MW terminal velocities in the region inside the solar circle, circular velocity as recently estimated from maser star forming regions at intermediate radii, and velocity dispersions of stellar halo tracers for the outermost Galactic region. The latter are reproduced by integrating the Jeans equation for every modeled mass distribution, and by allowing for different velocity anisotropies for different tracer populations. For comparison we also consider a Navarro-Frenk-White profile. We find that the cored profile is the preferred one, with a shallow central density of ρ H ∼ 4 × 10 7 M /kpc 3 and a large core radius R H ∼ 10 kpc, as observed in external spirals and in agreement with the mass model underlying the Universal Rotation Curve of spirals. We describe also the derived model uncertainties, which are crucially driven by the poorly constrained velocity dispersion anisotropies of halo tracers. The emerging cored DM distribution has implications for the DM annihilation angular profile, which is much less boosted in the Galactic center direction with respect to the case of the standard ΛCDM, NFW profile. Using the derived uncertainties we discuss finally the limitations and prospects to discriminate between cored and cusped DM profile with a possible observed diffuse DM annihilation signal. The present mass model aims to characterize the present-day description of the distribution of matter in our Galaxy, which is needed to frame current crucial issues of Cosmology, Astrophysics and Elementary Particles.

Journal of Physics: Conference Series, 2009

The nature of the microlensing events observed by the MACHO team towards the LMC still remains controversial. Low-mass substellar objects and stars with masses larger than ∼ 1 M⊙ have been ruled out, while stars of ∼ 0.5 M⊙ are the most probable candidates. This means that the microlenses should be either red or white dwarfs. Consequently, we assess jointly the relative contributions of both types of stars to the mass budget of the Galactic halo. We use a Monte Carlo code that incorporates up-to-date evolutionary sequences of both red dwarfs and white dwarfs as well as detailed descriptions of both our Galaxy and the LMC and we compare the synthetic populations obtained with our simulator with the results obtained by the MACHO and EROS experiments. We find that the contribution of the red dwarf population is not enough to explain the number of events measured by the MACHO team. Even though, the optical depth obtained in our simulations almost doubles that obtained when taking into account the white dwarf population alone. Finally, we also find that the contribution to the halo dark matter of the entire population under study is smaller than 10%, at the 95% confidence level.

Foundations of Physics, 2018

The evidence of the phenomenon for which, in galaxies, the gravitating mass is distributed differently than the luminous mass, increases as new data become available. Furthermore, this discrepancy is well structured and it depends on the magnitude and the compactness of the galaxy and on the radius, in units of its luminous size R opt , where the measure is performed. For the disk systems with −13 ≥ M I ≥ −24 all this leads to an amazing scenario, revealed by the investigation of individual and coadded rotation curves, according to which, the circular velocity follows, from their centers out to their virial radii, an universal profile V U RC (r/R opt , M I) function only of the properties of the luminous mass component. Moreover, from the Universal Rotation Curve, so as from many individual high quality RCs, we discover that, in the innermost regions of galaxies, the DM halo density profiles are very shallow. Finally, the disk mass, the central halo density and its core radius, come out all related to each other and to two properties of the distribution of light in galaxies: the luminosity and the compactness. This phenomenology, being absent in the simplest ΛCDM Cosmology scenario, poses serious challenges to the latter or, alternatively, it requires a substantial and tuned involvement of baryons in the formation of the galactic halos. On the other side, the URC helps to explain the two-accelerations relationship found by McGaugh et al 2016, in terms of only well known astrophysical processes, acting in a standard DM halos + luminous disks scenario.