Related papers: MACHO versus HST: how bright can dark matter be?
Gravitational potential fluctuations driven by bursty star formation can kinematically 'heat up' dark matter at the centres of dwarf galaxies. A key prediction of such models is that, at a fixed dark matter halo mass, dwarfs with a higher…
We carry on a new analysis of the sample of MACHO microlensing candidates towards the LMC. Our main purpose is to determine the lens population to which the events may belong. We give particular emphasis to the possibility of characterizing…
Observations of density profiles of galaxies and clusters constrain the properties of dark matter. Formation of stable halos by collisional fluids with very low mass particles appears as the most probable interpretation, while halos formed…
According to the Cold Dark Matter (CDM) hierarchical clustering theory of galaxy and large scale structure formation, there should be numerous low mass dark matter haloes present in the Universe today. If these haloes contain sufficient…
If compact baryonic objects contribute significantly to the dark matter in our Galaxy, their mass function will present vital clues for galaxy formation theories and star formation processes in the early Universe. Here we discuss what one…
Current microlensing searches calibrate the mass fraction of the Milky Way halo which is in the form of Massive Compact Halo Objects (MACHOs). We show that surveys like the Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS) can probe the same quantity in…
A simple interpretation of the more than dozen microlensing events seen in the direction of the LMC is a halo population of MACHOs which accounts for about half of the mass of the Galaxy. Such an interpretation is not without its problems,…
Measuring the density profile and mass concentration of dark-matter haloes is a key test of the standard cold dark matter paradigm. Such objects are dark and thus challenging to characterise, but they can be studied via gravitational…
Gravitational microlensing is a robust tool to detect and directly measure the abundance and mass of any kind of compact objects, either in our galaxy or in the extragalatic domain. On basis to generic, broadly applicable arguments, it is…
The simplest interpretation of the microlensing events observed towards the Large Magellanic Cloud is that approximately half of the mass of the Milky Way halo is in the form of MAssive Compact Halo Objects with $M \sim 0.5 M_{\odot}$. This…
Abundance matching between galaxies and halos has proven to be an informative technique, less dependent on detailed physical approximations than some other methods. We extend the discussion to the dwarf galaxies realm and to the study of…
We present results from a search for gravitational microlensing of stars in the Large Magellanic Cloud by low mass objects in the Galactic Halo. The search uses the CCD light curves of about 82,000 stars with up to 46 measurements per night…
The MACHO Project monitors millions of stars in the Large Magellanic Cloud, the Small Magellanic Cloud and the bulge of the Milky Way searching for the gravitational microlensing signature of baryonic dark matter. This Project has yielded…
The severity of the mass discrepancy in spiral galaxies is strongly correlated with the central surface brightness of the disk. Progressively lower surface brightness galaxies have ever larger mass discrepancies. No other parameter…
If the density distribution \rho (r) of MACHOs is spherically symmetric with respect to the Galactic center, it is shown that the minimal total mass M_{min}^{{ MACHO}} of the MACHOs is 1.7\times 10^{10}\sol \tau_{-6.7}^{{ LMC}} where…
Dark matter may consist of weakly interacting elementary particles or of macroscopic compact objects. We show that the statistics of the gravitational lensing of high redshift supernovae strongly discriminate between these two classes of…
We measure the projected density profile, shape and alignment of the stellar and dark matter mass distribution in 11 strong-lens galaxies. We find that the projected dark matter density profile - under the assumption of a Chabrier stellar…
We investigate stellar mass and central dark matter density profiles of photometric luminous red galaxies with stellar masses of $\sim10^{10}-10^{12}M_\odot$ using weak gravitational lensing measurements from the Hyper Suprime-Cam Subaru…
A fundamental prediction of the cold dark matter (CDM) model of structure formation is the existence of a vast population of dark matter haloes extending to subsolar masses. By contrast, other dark matter models, such as a warm thermal…
For 18 well-observed gravitationally lensed QSOs, we compare new non-parametric mass profiles for the lensing galaxies with stellar-population models derived from published HST photometry. The large volume of parameter space searched --…