Related papers: Dimming Starlight with Dark Compact Objects
Dark matter may be discovered through its capture in stars and subsequent annihilation. It is usually assumed that dark matter is captured after a single scattering event in the star, however this assumption breaks down for heavy dark…
Gravitational microlensing finds planets through their gravitational influence on the light coming from a more distant background star. The presence of the planet is then inferred from the tell-tale brightness variations of the background…
Very compact objects probe extreme gravitational fields and may be the key to understand outstanding puzzles in fundamental physics. These include the nature of dark matter, the fate of spacetime singularities, or the loss of unitarity in…
Dark matter particles populating our galactic halo could be directly detected by measuring their scattering off target nuclei or electrons in a suitable detector. As this interaction is expected to occur with very low probability and would…
We study the structure of compact objects that contain non-self annihilating, self-interacting dark matter admixed with ordinary matter made of neutron star and white dwarf materials. We extend the previous work Phys. Rev. D 92 123002…
Astronomical and cosmological observations of the past 80 years build solid evidence that atomic matter makes up only a small fraction of the matter in the universe. The dominant fraction does not interact with electromagnetic radiation,…
The population of solitary compact objects in the Galaxy is very diffcult to investigate. In this paper we analyze the possibility of using microlensing searches to detect and to analyze the properties of the solitary black holes and…
We show how observations of multiply-imaged quasars at high redshift can be used as a probe of dark matter clumps (subhalos with masses ~ 10^9 solar masses) within the virialized extent of more massive lensing halos. A large abundance of…
The status of the microlensing search for galactic dark matter in the form of massive astronomical compact halo objects (machos) is reviewed. Unresolved issues are discussed, as well as possible ways to solve these.
If a component of the dark matter has dissipative interactions, it could collapse to form a thin dark disk in our Galaxy that is coplanar with the baryonic disk. It has been suggested that dark disks could explain a variety of observed…
Dark matter is one of the pillars of the current standard model of structure formation: it is assumed to constitute most of the matter in the Universe. However, it can so far only be probed indirectly through its gravitational effects, and…
Gravitational lensing has now become a popular tool to measure the mass distribution of structures in the Universe on various scales. Here we focus on the study of galaxy's scale dark matter halos with galaxy-galaxy lensing techniques:…
Dark matter pervades the Solar System, free-streaming at the halo's local Galactic orbital velocity and density. As these objects pass through the Solar system, they perturb gravitationally, and thus very weakly, all nearby inertial masses.…
Weak gravitational lensing of distant galaxies by foreground structures has proven to be a powerful tool to study the mass distribution in the universe. The advent of panoramic cameras on 4m class telescope has led to a first generation of…
If dark matter self-annihilates then it may produce an observable signal when its density is high. The details depend on the intrinsic properties of dark matter and how it clusters in space. For example, the density profile of some dark…
We introduce a new method to search for the dark matter sector particles using laser light. Some dark matter particles may have a small mixing or interaction with a photon. High-power lasers provide substantial test grounds for these…
We use the non-observation of strong lensing of gravitational waves (GWs) in the first three observation runs of LIGO-Virgo detectors to constrain the fraction of dark matter in the form of compact objects in the mass range…
Mirror matter type dark matter can exist on the Earth's surface, potentially in enhanced concentrations at various anomalous impact sites. Mirror matter fragments can draw in heat from the ordinary matter environment, radiate mirror photons…
Gravitational lensing allows us to probe the structure of matter on a broad range of astronomical scales, and as light from a distant source traverses an intervening galaxy, compact matter such as planets, stars, and black holes act as…
For nearly a century, more mass has been measured in galaxies than is contained in the luminous stars and gas. Through continual advances in observations and theory, it has become clear that the dark matter in galaxies is not comprised of…