Astrometric weak lensing with Gaia DR3 and future catalogues: searches for dark matter substructure

Abstract

Small-scale dark matter structures lighter than a billion solar masses are an important probe of primordial density fluctuations and dark matter microphysics. Due to their lack of starlight emission, their only guaranteed signatures are gravitational in nature. We report on results of a search for astrometric weak lensing by compact dark matter subhalos in the Milky Way with Gaia DR3 data. Using a matched-filter analysis to look for correlated imprints of time-domain lensing on the proper motions of background stars in the Magellanic Clouds, we exclude order-unity substructure fractions in halos with masses Ml between 107 M⊙ and 109 M⊙ and sizes of one parsec or smaller. We forecast that a similar approach based on proper accelerations across the entire sky with data from Gaia DR4 may be sensitive to substructure fractions of fl ≳ 10−3 in the much lower mass range of 10 M⊙ ≲ Ml ≲ 3 × 103 M⊙. We further propose an analogous technique for stacked star-star lensing events in the regime of large impact parameters. Our first implementation is not yet sufficiently sensitive but serves as a useful diagnostic and calibration tool; future data releases should enable average stellar mass measurements using this stacking method.