White dwarfs, red dwarfs and halo dark matter

Physics

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Scientific paper

The nature of the microlensing events observed by the MACHO team towards the LMC still remains controversial. Low-mass substellar objects and stars with masses larger than ~ 1Modot have been ruled out, while stars of ~ 0.5 Modot are the most probable candidates. This means that the microlenses should be either red or white dwarfs. Consequently, we assess jointly the relative contributions of both types of stars to the mass budget of the Galactic halo. We use a Monte Carlo code that incorporates up-to-date evolutionary sequences of both red dwarfs and white dwarfs as well as detailed descriptions of both our Galaxy and the LMC and we compare the synthetic populations obtained with our simulator with the results obtained by the MACHO and EROS experiments. We find that the contribution of the red dwarf population is not enough to explain the number of events measured by the MACHO team. Even though, the optical depth obtained in our simulations almost doubles that obtained when taking into account the white dwarf population alone. Finally, we also find that the contribution to the halo dark matter of the entire population under study is smaller than 10%, at the 95% confidence level.

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