U.S.-Australia Cooperative Research: The MACHO Project; A Search for Baryonic Dark Matter

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This award supports visits over three years by a U.S. team, consisting of Drs. Charles R. Alcock, Timothy Axelrod, David Bennett, Kem Cook, and Hye-Sook Park of Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, and Drs. Kim Griest, Saul Perlmutter, and Christopher Stubbs of the Center for Particle Astrophysics, University of California Berkeley, to collaborate with Drs. Ken Freeman, Bruce Peterson, Peter Quinn, and Alex Rodgers of the Mount Stromlo and Siding Spring Observatories, Australian National University. The team of investigators is developing a dedicated system with which they will conduct a definitive search for massive objects known as MACHOs (Massive Compact Halo Objects, such as brown dwarfs and Jupiters), which plausibly might comprise the dark matter in the halo of the Milky Way galaxy. In "standard" Big-Bang nucleosynthesis theory, the presence in the universe of some baryonic dark matter is required: this matter could be contained in MACHOs. The investigators will make photometric measurements on up to three million Magellanic Cloud (or Galactic Bulge) stars each night for four years in order to detect the occasional amplification of these stars by the gravitational microlens effect.