MACHO Project Limits on Black Hole Dark Matter in the 1-30 M☉ Range

By Charles R. Alcock, R. Allsman, D. Alves, T. Axelrod, A. Becker, D. Bennett, K. Cook, N. Dalal, A. J. Drake, K. C. Freeman and 15 more. 2000

257 citations recorded by the source corpus.

We report on a search for long-duration microlensing events toward the Large Magellanic Cloud. We find none and therefore put limits on the contribution of high-mass objects to the Galactic dark matter. At a 95% confidence level, we exclude objects in the mass range of 0.3-30.0 M☉ from contributing more than 4 × 1011 M☉ to the Galactic halo. Combined with earlier results, this means that objects with masses under 30 M☉ cannot make up the entire dark matter halo if the halo is of typical size. For a typical dark halo, objects with masses under 10 M☉ contribute less than 40% of the dark matter.

Subfields: Astronomy and Astrophysics, Nuclear and High Energy Physics

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/0e1c1dca551baaa88d3f49092568ded160f9392e

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In Astronomy and Astrophysics

1. Volker Bromm
2. T. Terada
3. K. Kohri
4. Marc Kamionkowski Caltech
5. Cfa
6. Michael R. Santos
7. Thomas Greif
8. Matthew R. Bate

In Nuclear and High Energy Physics

1. T. Terada
2. Marc Kamionkowski Caltech
3. Cfa
4. Michael R. Santos
5. Volker Bromm
6. K. Kohri
7. B. Carr
8. A. Ferrara

Citations in the corpus

• Solar-mass primordial black holes explain NANOGrav hint of gravitational waves (2020, background): “These include the microlensing constraints by EROS/MACHO collaborations [78, 79], the caustic crossing constraint [80], Advanced LIGO constraints on the subsolar mass range (individual events [81] and superposition of events [82, 83]), and the constraints due to photo-emission during gas accretion o”