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That's right. Those are called massive compact halo objects (MACHOs). From "Dark Matter: A Primer" (https://arxiv.org/abs/1006.2483 https://arxiv.org/abs/1006
by xenophonf 5y ago
That's right. Those are called massive compact halo objects (MACHOs). From "Dark Matter: A Primer" (https://arxiv.org/abs/1006.2483 https://arxiv.org/abs/1006.2483):
To hunt for these objects two collaborations, the MACHO Collaboration and the EROS-2 Survey, searched for gravitational microlensing (the changing brightness of a distant object due to the interference of a nearby object) caused by possible MACHOs in the Milky Way halo. (Other collaborations have studied this as well, such as MOA, OGLE, and SuperMACHO.) The MACHO Collaboration painstakingly observed and statistically analyzed the skies for such lensing; 11.9 million stars were studied, with only 13-17 possible lensing events detected. In April of 2007, the EROS-2 Survey reported even fewer events, observing a sample of 7 million bright stars with only one lensing candidate found. This low number of possible MACHOs can only account for a very small percentage of the non-luminous mass in our galaxy, revealing that most dark matter cannot be strongly concentrated or exist in the form of baryonic astrophysical objects. Although microlensing surveys rule out baryonic objects like brown dwarfs, black holes, and neutron stars in our galactic halo, can other forms of baryonic matter make up the bulk of dark matter? The answer, surprisingly, is no, and the evidence behind this claim comes from Big Bang Nucleosynthesis (BBN) and the Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB).
That paragraph references "The SuperMACHO Microlensing Survey," "The MACHO project: microlensing results from 5.7 years of large magellanic cloud observations," and "Limits on the MACHO content of the galactic halo from the EROS-2 survey of the magellanic clouds," if you feel like reading a bunch of physics research papers.
- 8note 5y agoMachos are a certain mass of black holes, aren't they? Or does it include small but dense ones too? I suppose we'd see those on the microwave background though if hawking radiation holds true for small black holes
- xenophonf 5y agoNot just black holes, but neutron stars and brown dwarfs, too. These studies ruled out MACHOs with masses in the range of 10^(−8) to 100 solar masses. That's 1/3rd the mass of the Moon to five times the mass of Betelgeuse. For black holes to be visible due to Hawking radiation against the cosmic microwave background, they would have to be pretty small, about 0.8% of the mass of Earth or about the mass of the Moon (https://arxiv.org/abs/astro-ph/9911309 https://arxiv.org/abs/astro-ph/9911309). I don't think anyone's found such a small black hole anywhere, yet. If they did, it would be a pretty big discovery since such a small black hole would have to be primordial. As an aside, "dense" doesn't really make sense in the context of a black hole, which has infinite density.