Baryonic dark matter

Baryonic dark matter

Baryonic dark matter is dark matter (matter that doesn't emit light) composed of baryons, i.e. protons and neutrons. Candidates forbaryonic dark matter are non-luminous gas, MACHOs, and brown dwarfs.

The total amount of baryonic dark matter can be calculated from big bang nucleosynthesis, and observations of the cosmic microwave background. Bothindicate that the amount of baryonic dark matter is much smaller than the total amount of dark matter.

In the case of big bang nucleosynthesis, the problem is that large amounts of ordinary matter means a denser early universe, more efficient conversion of matter to helium-4 and less unburned deuterium that can remain. If one assumes that all of the dark matter in the universe consists of baryons, then there is far too much deuterium in the universe. This could be resolved if there were some means of generating deuterium, but large efforts in the 1970s failed to come up with plausible mechanisms for this to occur.This happened because of MACHOs(Massive Astrophysical Compact Halo Objects) include, for example, brown dwarfs which are balls of hydrogen and helium with masses < 0.08M⊙ and therefore never begin nuclear fusion of hydrogen [1] (but they do burn deuterium), jupiters which are similar to brown dwarfs but have masses ∼ 0.001M⊙ [1] and do not burn anything, and white dwarfs [1] . Actually, objects with masses around or below the hydrogen-burning limit could be baryonic Dark Matter [2] .

References

* [1] G. Jungman, M. Kamionkowski, and K. Griest, Phys. Rep. 267, 195 (1996).
* [2] M. S. Turner, arXiv:astro-ph/9904051 (1999).


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