The mass density in our Galaxy. II - F dwarfs and K giants as density tracers

The method used by Bahcall (1984) in his computation of the density law of star samples obtained by Upgren (1962, 1963) is reexamined in order to determine the cause of the conflict between Bahcall's finding of large amounts of unseen mass and the estimate of mass density obtained by the method proposed by Bienayme et al. (1987). In particular, the fit of Bahcall's density models on the original Upgren star count data using the m-log(pi) method is discussed. It is shown that the m-log(pi) method provides estimates of the density that are significantly biased resulting in getting too much missing mass.