Massive compact halo object

"MACHO" redirects here. For other uses, see Macho (disambiguation).

Massive astrophysical compact halo object, or MACHO, is a general name for any kind of astronomical body that might explain the apparent presence of dark matter in galaxy halos. A MACHO is a body composed of normal baryonic matter, which emits little or no radiation and drifts through interstellar space unassociated with any solar system. Since MACHOs would not emit any light of their own, they would be very hard to detect. MACHOs may sometimes be black holes or neutron stars as well as brown dwarfs or unassociated planets. White dwarfs and very faint red dwarfs have also been proposed as candidate MACHOs. The term was chosen whimsically by contrast with WIMP, another proposed form of dark matter.

Detection

A MACHO may be detected when it passes in front of or nearly in front of a star and the MACHO's gravity bends the light, causing the star to appear brighter in an example of gravitational lensing known as gravitational microlensing. Several groups have searched for MACHOs by searching for the microlensing amplification of light. These groups have ruled out dark matter being explained by MACHOs with mass in the range 0.00000001 solar masses to 100 solar masses. One group, the MACHO collaboration, claims to have found enough microlensing to predict the existence of many MACHOs with mass of about 0.5 solar masses, enough to make up perhaps 20% of the dark matter in the galaxy.^[1] This suggests that MACHOs could be white dwarfs or red dwarfs which have similar masses. However, red and white dwarfs are not completely dark; they do emit some light, and so can be searched for with the Hubble Telescope and with proper motion surveys. These searches have ruled out the possibility that these objects make up a significant fraction of dark matter in our galaxy. Another group, the EROS2 collaboration does not confirm the signal claims by the MACHO group. They did not find enough microlensing effect with a sensitivity higher by a factor 2.^[2] Observations using the Hubble Space Telescope's NICMOS instrument showed that less than one percent of the halo mass is composed of red dwarfs.^[3][4] This corresponds to a negligible fraction of the dark matter halo mass. Therefore, the missing mass problem is not solved by MACHOs.

Types of MACHOs

MACHOs may sometimes be considered to include black holes. Black holes are truly black in that they emit no light and any light shone upon them is absorbed and not reflected. It is thought possible that there is a halo of black holes surrounding the galaxy. A black hole can sometimes be detected by the halo of bright gas and dust that forms around it as an accretion disc being pulled in by the black hole's gravity. Such a disk can generate jets of gas that are shot out away from the black hole because it cannot be absorbed quickly enough. An isolated black hole, however, would not have an accretion disk and would only be detectable by gravitational lensing. Cosmologists doubt they make up a majority of dark matter because the black holes are at isolated points of the galaxy. The largest contributor to the missing mass must be spread throughout the galaxy to balance the gravity. A minority of physicists, including Chapline and Laughlin, believe that the widely accepted model of the black hole is wrong and needs to be replaced by a new model, the dark energy star; in the general case for the suggested new model, the cosmological distribution of dark energy would be slightly lumpy and dark energy stars of primordial type might be a possible candidate for MACHOs.

Neutron stars are somewhat like black holes, but are not heavy enough to collapse completely, instead forming into a material rather like that of an atomic nucleus (sometimes informally called neutronium). After sufficient time these stars could radiate away enough energy to become cold enough that they would be too faint to see. Likewise, old white dwarfs may also become cold and dead, eventually becoming black dwarfs, although the universe is not thought to be old enough for any stars to have reached this stage.

The next candidate for MACHOs are the brown dwarfs mentioned above. Brown dwarfs are sometimes called "failed stars" as they do not have enough mass for nuclear fusion to begin and simply glow a dull brown. Hence, their only source of energy is released through their own gravitational contraction, and may therefore be faintly visible in some circumstances. Most brown dwarfs are about thirteen to seventy-five times the mass of Jupiter.

Theoretical considerations

Theoretical work simultaneously also showed that ancient MACHOs are not likely to account for the large amounts of dark matter now thought to be present in the universe.^[5] The Big Bang as it is currently understood couldn't produce enough baryons without causing major problems in the observed elemental abundances,^[6] including the abundance of deuterium.^[7] Furthermore, separate observations of baryon acoustic oscillations, both in the cosmic microwave background and large-scale structure of galaxies, set limits on the total baryon-to-total matter ratio. These observations show that a large fraction of non-baryonic matter is necessary regardless of the presence or absence of MACHOs.^{[citation needed]}

See also

• Weakly Interacting Massive Particles (WIMPS) (An alternate theory of Dark Matter)
• Robust Associations of Massive Baryonic Objects (RAMBOs)

References

1. ^ C. Alcock et al., The MACHO Project: Microlensing Results from 5.7 Years of LMC Observations. Astrophys.J. 542 (2000) 281-307
2. ^ P. Tisserand et al., Limits on the Macho Content of the Galactic Halo from the EROS-2 Survey of the Magellanic Clouds, 2007, Astron. Astrophys. 469, 387-404
3. ^ David Graff and Katherine Freese, [1], Analysis of a hubble space telescope search for red dwarfs: limits on baryonic matter in the galactic halo, Astrophys.J.456:L49,1996.
4. ^ J. Najita, G. Tiede, and S. Carr, From Stars to Superplanets: The Low-Mass Initial Mass Function in the Young Cluster IC 348. The Astrophysical Journal 541, 1 (2000), 977–1003
5. ^ Katherine Freese, Brian Fields, and David Graff,[2] Limits on stellar objects as the dark matter of our halo: nonbaryonic dark matter seems to be required.
6. ^ Brian Fields, Katherine Freese, and David Graff,[3] Chemical abundance constraints on white dwarfs as halo dark matter, Astrophys.J.534:265-276,2000.
7. ^ Arnon Dar, Dark Matter and Big Bang Nucleosynthesis. Astrophys. J., 449 (1995) 550