Brown Dwarfs, White Knights and Demons

Details Brown Dwarfs, White Knights and Demons Brown Dwarfs, White Knights and Demons

1998-05-24

arxiv.org/abs/astro-ph/9805304v1

Astronomy and Astrophysics

Astrophysics

15 pages, 3 figures, in press at The Astrophysical Journal (Letters)

Scientific paper

10.1086/311478

This paper investigates the hypothesis that the lensing objects towards the Large Magellanic Cloud (LMC) are brown dwarfs by analysing the effects of velocity anisotropy on the inferred microlensing masses. To reduce the masses, the transverse velocity of the lenses with respect to the microlensing tube must be minimised. In the outer halo, radial anisotropy is best for doing this; closer to the solar circle, azimuthal anisotropy is best. By using a constraint on the total kinetic energy of the tracer population from the Jeans equations, the microlensing mass is minimised over orientations of the velocity dispersion tensor. This minimum mass is about a tenth of a solar mass, which lies above the hydrogen burning limit. This demonstrates explicitly that populations of brown dwarfs with smoothly decreasing densities and dynamically mixed velocity distributions cannot be responsible for the microlensing events. Brown dwarfs are no white knights! There is one caveat. If there are demons sitting on the microlensing tube, they can drop brown dwarfs so as to reproduce the microlensing data-set exactly. Such a distribution is not smooth and does not give well-mixed velocities in phase space. It is a permissible solution only if the outer halo is dynamically young and lumpy. In such a case, theorists cannot rule out brown dwarfs. Only exorcists can!

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