Related papers: Star Counts From HST: Implications for Dark Matter
Little is known about the content and distribution of dark matter in spiral galaxies. To break the degeneracy in galaxy rotation curve decompositions, which allows a wide range of dark matter halo density profiles, an independent measure of…
How is mass distributed in the Universe? How does it compare with the distribution of light and stars? We address these questions by examining the distribution of mass, determined from weak lensing observations, and starlight, around…
There is abundant evidence that the mass of the Universe is dominated by dark matter of unknown form. The MACHO project is one of several teams searching for the dark matter around our Galaxy in the form of Massive Compact Halo Objects…
If the dark matter in galactic halos is made up of compact, macroscopic objects (MO), such as black holes with $M_\MO >>M_{stars}$, gravitational scattering will lead to kinematic heating of the stars. Observational constraints on the…
The simplest interpretation of the microlensing events towards the Large Magellanic Cloud detected by the MACHO and EROS collaborations is that about one third of the halo of our own Milky Way galaxy exists in the form of objects of around…
We report on a search for long duration microlensing events towards the Large Magellanic Cloud. We find none, and therefore put limits on the contribution of high mass objects to the Galactic dark matter. At 95% confidence level we exclude…
The French collaboration EROS and the American-Australian collaboration MACHO have reported the observation of altogether $\sim$ 10 microlensing events by monitoring during several years the brightness of millions of stars in the Large…
We use the calculations derived in a previous paper (M\'era, Chabrier and Schaeffer, 1997), based on observational constraints arising from star counts, microlensing experiments and kinematic properties, to determine the amount of dark…
New information on the relations between the Galactic disks, the halo, and satellite galaxies is being obtained from elemental abundances of stars having metallicities in the range -1.5 < [Fe/H] < -0.5. The first results for a sample of 26…
The spatial distribution of compact dark matter in our Galaxy can be determined in a few years of monitoring Galactic globular clusters for microlensing. Globular clusters are the only dense fields of stars distributed throughout the…
We study a sample of 257 Galactic disk M dwarfs (8<M_V<18.5) found in images obtained using HST. These include 192 stars in 22 fields imaged with the repaired WFC2 with mean limiting mag I=23.7 and 65 stars in 162 fields imaged with the…
Among the most explored directions in the study of dense stellar systems is the investigation of the effects of the retention of supernova remnants, especially that of the massive stellar remnant black holes (BHs), in star clusters. By…
Microlensing has established itself as a powerful new method for the detection of baryonic dark matter in the Galaxy. The theory of microlensing is sketched and its similarity with the optical effect of twinkling is explained. The bulk of…
Deep fields are unique probes of the Galactic halo. With a limiting magnitude of, e.g., I = 30 mag, all stars down to the hydrogen-burning limit are detected out to distances of 10 kpc, while stars with 0.5 solar masses could be traced out…
Microlensing observations have now become a useful tool in searching for non--luminous astrophysical compact objects (brown dwarfs, faint stars, neutron stars, black holes and even planets). Originally conceived for establishing whether the…
Dark matter is an important ingredient of galaxies, as was recognised early on by Ken Freeman himself! Evidence for dark matter halos is still indirect, based on analysing motions of tracers such as gas and stars. In a sense the visible…
In the hierarchical formation model, galaxy clusters grow by accretion of smaller groups or isolated galaxies. During the infall into the centre of a cluster, the properties of accreted galaxies change. In particular, both observations and…
Brown dwarfs, stars with insufficient mass to burn hydrogen, could contribute to the dark matter in the Galactic disk, galactic halos or even a background critical density. We consider the detectability of such brown dwarfs in various…
The known nearby stars, moving in front of the background of distant stars and galaxies, create 'weak gravitational lensing' variations in their positions. These variations may be measurable with the HST, and they may allow a direct mass…
We re-examine a deep {\it Hubble Space Telescope} pencil-beam search for red dwarfs, stars just massive enough to burn Hydrogen. The authors of this search (Bahcall, Flynn, Gould \& Kirhakos 1994) found that red dwarfs make up less than 6\%…