Astronomy and Astrophysics – Astronomy
Scientific paper
Aug 1998
adsabs.harvard.edu/cgi-bin/nph-data_query?bibcode=1998newar..42..129e&link_type=abstract
New Astronomy Reviews, Volume 42, Issue 2, p. 129-135.
Astronomy and Astrophysics
Astronomy
Scientific paper
It is a struggle to understand the data provided by the gravitational microlensing experiments towards the Large Magellanic Cloud (LMC). Two key questions are: how massive are the lenses and where are the lenses? Provided the halo is not too lumpy, the lenses have an average mass of around 0.3 M_solar, which is markedly greater than the hydrogen-burning limit. This rules out brown dwarfs, while red dwarfs and white dwarfs are not likely as they strongly violate other astrophysical constraints. For these reasons, the nature of the lensing population remains mysterious. One attractive possibility is that the lenses are not denizens of the Milky Way halo at all, but lie in intervening structures - possibly a warped and flaring disk, possibly tidal debris enveloping the LMC, possibly extensions to the thick disk. In this viewpoint, the Milky Way halo is entirely non-baryonic and the microlensing experiments are detecting the structures and stellar populations of the outer Milky Way or the LMC.
Evans Wyn N.
Gyuk Geza
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