English

Dark Matter distinguished by skewed microlensing in the "Dragon Arc"

Cosmology and Nongalactic Astrophysics 2024-05-31 v1

Abstract

Microlensed stars recently discovered by JWST & HST follow closely the winding critical curve of A370 along all sections of the ``Dragon Arc" traversed by the critical curve. These transients are fainter than mAB>26.5m_{AB}>26.5, corresponding to the Asymptotic Giant Branch (AGB) and microlensed by diffuse cluster stars observed with 18M/pc2\simeq 18M_\odot/pc^2, or about 1\simeq 1\% of the projected dark matter density. Most microlensed stars appear along the inner edge of the critical curve, following an asymmetric band of width 4\simeq 4kpc that is skewed by 0.7±0.2-0.7\pm0.2kpc. Some skewness is expected as the most magnified images should form along the inner edge of the critical curve with negative parity, but the predicted shift is small 0.04\simeq -0.04kpc and the band of predicted detections is narrow, 1.4\simeq 1.4kpc. Adding CDM-like dark halos of 1068M10^{6-8}M_\odot broadens the band as desired but favours detections along the outer edge of the critical curve, in the wrong direction, where sub-halos generate local Einstein rings. Instead, the interference inherent to ``Wave Dark Matter" as a Bose-Einstein condensate (ψ\psiDM) forms a symmetric band of critical curves that favours negative parity detections. A de Broglie wavelength of 10\simeq 10pc matches well the observed 44kpc band of microlenses and predicts negative skewness 0.6\simeq -0.6kpc, similar to the data. The implied corresponding boson mass is 1022\simeq 10^{-22}eV, in good agreement with estimates from dwarf galaxy cores when scaled by momentum. Further JWST imaging may reveal the pattern of critical curves by simply ``joining the dots" between microlensed stars, allowing wave corrugations of ψ\psiDM to be distinguished from CDM sub-halos

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2405.19422,
  title  = {Dark Matter distinguished by skewed microlensing in the "Dragon Arc"},
  author = {Tom Broadhurst and Sung Kei Li and Amruth Alfred and Jose M. Diego and Paloma Morilla and Patrick L. Kelly and Fengwu Sun and Masamune Oguri and Hayley Williams and Rogier Windhorst and Adi Zitrin and Katsuya T. Abe and Wenlei Chen and Yoshinobu Fudamoto and Hiroki Kawai and Jeremy Lim and Tao Liu and Ashish K. Meena and Jose M. Palencia and George F. Smoot and Liliya L. R. Williams},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2405.19422},
  year   = {2024}
}

Comments

12 pages, 5 figures