Blank field submm sources, failed stars, and the dark matter

Details Blank field submm sources, failed stars, and the dark matter Blank field submm sources, failed stars, and the dark matter

2000-10-06

arxiv.org/abs/astro-ph/0010135v1

Mon.Not.Roy.Astron.Soc. 323 (2001) 147

Astronomy and Astrophysics

Astrophysics

25 pages, 1 figure, to be published in Monthly Notices of the RAS

Scientific paper

10.1046/j.1365-8711.2001.04116.x

I discuss the possibility that a significant fraction (possibly a third) of the faint SCUBA sources are not in fact high redshift galaxies, but actually local cold dark dusty gas clouds emitting only in the submm, with a temperature around 7K. I show that the observational constraints on such a population - dynamical limits on missing matter, the FIR-mm background, and the absence of gross high-latitude extinction features - constrains the mass of such objects to be in the range 0.1 - 10 Jupiter masses. The characteristics deduced are closely similar to those of the objects proposed by Walker and Wardle (1998) to explain halo dark matter. However, such objects, if they explain a large fraction of the SCUBA sources, cannot extend through the halo without greatly exceeding the FIR-mm background. Instead, I deduce the characteristic distance of the SCUBA sources to be around 100 pc, consistent with being drawn from a disk population with a scale height of few hundred parsecs. Regardless of the dark matter problem, the possible existence of such compact sub-stellar but non-degenerate objects is intriguing. They may be seen as "failed stars", representing an alternative end-point to brown dwarfs. It is possible that they greatly outnumber both stars and brown dwarfs. The nearest such object could be a fraction of a parsec away. Several relatively simple observations could critically test this hypothesis.

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