The sensitivity of the seismic solar model to Newton's constant
MONTHLY NOTICES OF THE ROYAL ASTRONOMICAL SOCIETY 341:3 (2003) 721-728
Forming stars on an exponential timescale: the key to exponential stellar profiles in disc galaxies?
Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society 333 (2002) 894-910
Observable consequences of cold clouds as dark matter
Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society 332:2 (2002)
Abstract:
Cold, dense clouds of gas have been proposed to explain the dark matter in Galactic haloes, and have also been invoked in the Galactic disc as an explanation for the excess faint submillimetre sources detected by SCUBA. Even if their dust-to-gas ratio is only a small percentage of that in conventional gas clouds, these dense systems would be opaque to visible radiation. We examine the possibility that the data sets of microlensing experiments searching for massive compact halo objects can also be used to search for occultation signatures by such clouds. We compute the rate and time-scale distribution of stellar transits by clouds in the Galactic disc and halo. We find that, for cloud parameters typically advocated by theoretical models, thousands of transit events should already exist within microlensing survey data sets. We examine the seasonal modulation in the rate caused by the Earth's orbital motion and find it provides an excellent probe of whether detected clouds are of disc or halo origin.Solar neutrinos: probing the quasi-isothermal solar core produced by supersymmetric dark matter particles.
Phys Rev Lett 88:15 (2002) 151303
Abstract:
SNO measurements strongly constrain the central temperature of the Sun, to within a precision of much less than 1%. This result can be used to probe the parameter space of supersymmetric dark matter. In this first analysis we find a lower limit for the weakly interacting massive particle (WIMP) mass of 60 GeV. Furthermore, in the event that WIMPs create a quasi-isothermal core, they will produce a peculiar distribution of the solar neutrino fluxes measured on Earth. Typically, a WIMP with a mass of 100 GeV and annihilation cross section of 10(-34) cm(3)/sec will decrease the neutrino predictions, by up to 4% for the Cl, by 3% for the heavy water, and by 1% for the Ga detectors.Merger histories in warm dark matter structure formation scenarios
Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society 329:4 (2002) 813-828