Some Consequences of the Baryonic Dark Matter Population

Microlensed double-image quasars have sent a consistent message that the baryonic dark matter consists of a population of free-roaming planet mass objects, as summarized previously. These were previously predicted to have formed at the time of recombination, 300,000 years after the Big Bang, whence they collapsed on a Kelvin Helmholz time scale. Today they are glimpsed as the cometary knots in planetary nebulae. But they probably also nucleate the mysterious Lyman-alpha clouds and cause a reduction in the transparency of the universe to distant quasars and supernovae.Comment: Report to the Edinburgh International Dark Matter 2004 Symposiu

Can gravitational waves be detected in quasar microlensing?

Studies of the lensed quasar ${\rm Q}0957+561 {\rm A,B}$ have shown evidence for microlensing in the brightness history of the quasar images. It had been suggested that a frequency offset between the brightness fluctuations in each of the two images might possibly be caused by gravitational radiation generated by a massive black hole binary at the center of the lensing galaxy. This paper demonstrates that the fluctuations produced by such a source of gravitational waves will be too small to account for the observed frequency offsets.Comment: 10 pages, 1 fig; submitted to Ap