Mass-radius relation of Newtonian self-gravitating Bose-Einstein condensates with short-range interactions: II. Numerical results

By Pierre-Henri Chavanis. 2011

424 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Several recent astrophysical observations of distant type Ia supernovae have revealed that the content of the universe is made of about 70% of dark energy, 25% of dark matter and 5% of baryonic (visible) matter [1]. Thus, the overwhelming preponderance of matter and energy in the universe is believed to be dark i.e. unobservable by telescopes. The dark energy is responsible for the accelerated expansion of the universe. Its origin is mysterious and presumably related to the cosmological constant. Dark energy is usually interpreted as a vacuum energy and it behaves like a fluid with negative pressure. Dark matter also is mysterious. The suggestion that dark matter may constitute a large part of the universe was raised by Zwicky [2] in 1933. Using the virial theorem to infer the average mass of galaxies within the Coma cluster, he obtained a value much larger than the mass of luminous material. He realized therefore that some mass was “missing” in order to account for observations. This missing mass problem was confirmed later by accurate measurements of rotation curves of disc galaxies [3, 4]. The rotation curves of neutral hydrogen clouds in spiral galaxies measured from the Doppler effect are found to be roughly flat (instead of Keplerian) with a typical rotational velocity v∞ ∼ 200km/s up to the maximum observed radius of about 50 kpc. This mass profile is much more extended than the distribution of starlight which typically converges within ∼ 10 kpc. This implies that galaxies are surrounded by an extended halo of dark matter whose mass M(r) = rv 2/G increases linearly with radius [56]. This can be conveniently modeled by an isothermal self-gravitating gas the density of which scales asymptotically as r −2 [6].

Subfields: Astronomy and Astrophysics, Atomic and Molecular Physics, and Optics

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/8742c987e51c132d8fd8c5341e6eccea16348e3a

How researchers see this paper

The researchers whose trusted networks rank it highest, strongest advocate first. Every researcher gets a different order.

In Astronomy and Astrophysics

In Atomic and Molecular Physics, and Optics

Citations in the corpus

Growth of perturbations in an expanding universe with Bose-Einstein condensate dark matter (2011, methodology): “In our previous papers (Chavanis 2011, Chavanis & Delfini 2011), we performed an exhaustive study of the equilibrium configurations of a Newtonian self-gravitating BEC with short-range interactions.”
Dynamical boson stars (2012, background): “(58) which involves a pseudo-potential for a Bose–Einstein condensate, to model either dark matter or compact alternatives to neutron stars [87, 86, 89, 88, 90].”
Early seeds of axion miniclusters (2018, background): “Most discussed lately is the issue of dilute axion-stars [20]— gravitationally bound solitons [31–36] of the axion field which can easily appear in this scenario (for instance in the cores of miniclusters [37, 38], but not only).”