Related papers: Is Galactic Dark Matter White ?
Low luminosity dwarf galaxies provide stringent constraints on the nature of dark matter. Establishing these constraints depends on precise kinematic measurements of individual stars. In this overview for non-specialists, we describe…
White dwarfs, the most abundant stellar remnants, provide a promising means of probing dark matter (DM) interactions, complimentary to terrestrial searches. The scattering of dark matter from stellar constituents leads to gravitational…
The diffuse gamma ray emission from astrophysical backgrounds in our Galaxy and the signal due to the annihilation or decay of Dark Matter (DM) in the Galactic Halo are expected to have a substantially different morphology and spectral…
Dark matter is thought to make up most of the matter density of the Universe, yet its true nature remains uncertain. Among dark matter theories, Weakly Interacting Massive Particles (WIMPs) are a prominent candidate for dark matter because…
For nearly 40 years, dark matter has been widely assumed to be cold and collisionless. Cold dark matter models make fundamental predictions for the behavior of dark matter on small (<10 kpc) scales. These predictions include cuspy density…
The presence of brown dwarfs in the dark galactic halo could be detected through their gravitational lensing effect and experiments under way monitor about one million stars to observe a few lensing events per year. We show that if the…
Cold, dense clouds of gas have been proposed as baryonic candidates for the dark matter in Galactic haloes, and have also been invoked in the Galactic disc as an explanation for the excess faint sub-mm sources detected by SCUBA. Even if…
The recent discovery of microlensing of stars in the Large Magellanic Cloud has excited much interest in the nature of the lensing population. Detailed analyses indicate that the mass of these objects ranges from 0.3-0.8 solar masses,…
Stellar sources are identified in the Hubble Deep Field, and accurate colours and magnitudes are presented. The predictions of a Galactic starcounts model are compared with the faint stellar counts in this field. The model reproduces the…
Using a new grid of models of cooling white dwarfs, we calculate isochrones and luminosity functions in the Johnson-Kron/Cousins and HST filter sets for systems containing old white dwarfs. These new models incorporate a non-grey atmosphere…
The space density of white dwarfs is highly uncertain even nearby. This results from the fact that the known sample of white dwarfs is largely incomplete in part because most white dwarfs have been discovered as by-products in non-dedicated…
Directional detection is a promising Dark Matter search strategy. Taking advantage on the rotation of the Solar system around the galactic center through the Dark Matter halo, it allows to show a direction dependence of WIMP events that may…
Deriving precise stellar ages is a challenging task. Consequently, age-dependent relations - such as the age-metallicity and age-velocity dispersion relations of the Milky Way, or the age-rotation-activity relation of low-mass stars - are…
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…
An overview is presented of the main properties of dark matter haloes, as we know them from observations, essentially from rotation curves around spiral and dwarf galaxies. Detailed rotation curves are now known for more than a thousand…
The cold dark matter scenario of hierarchical large-scale structure formation predicts the existence of abundant subhalos around large galaxies. However, the number of observed dwarf galaxies is far from this theoretical prediction,…
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…
The cold dark matter halo mass function is much steeper than the galaxy stellar mass function on galactic and subgalactic scales. This difference is usually reconciled by assuming that the galaxy formation efficiency drops sharply with…
Cosmological nucleosynthesis calculations imply that many of the baryons in the Universe must be dark. We discuss the likelihood that some of these dark baryons may reside in the discs or halos of galaxies. If they were in the form of…
Dark matter constitutes the great majority of the matter content in the Universe, but its microscopic nature remains an intriguing mystery, with profound implications for particle physics, astrophysics and cosmology. Here we shed light on…