Related papers: Strong lensing by subhalos in the dwarf-galaxy mas…
Cosmological structure formation predicts that our galactic halo contains an enormous hierarchy of substructures and streams, the remnants of the merging hierarchy that began with tiny Earth mass microhalos. If these structures persist…
We predict that there is a population of low-luminosity dwarf galaxies orbiting within the halo of the Milky Way that have surface brightnesses low enough to have escaped detection in star-count surveys. The overall count of stealth…
We describe our recent attempts to model substructure in dark matter halos down to very small masses, using a semi-analytic model of halo formation. The results suggest that numerical simulations of halo formation may still be missing…
Recent high-resolution simulations of the formation of dark-matter halos have shown that the distribution of subhalos is scale-free, in the sense that if scaled by the velocity dispersion of the parent halo, the velocity distribution…
We investigate the possibility of applying machine learning techniques to images of strongly lensed galaxies to detect a low mass cut-off in the spectrum of dark matter sub-halos within the lens system. We generate lensed images of systems…
Examining the properties of subhalos with strong gravitational lensing images can shed light on the nature of dark matter. From upcoming large-scale surveys, we expect to discover orders of magnitude more strong lens systems that can be…
We use the Millennium Simulation, a large, high resolution N-body simulation of the evolution of structure in a LambdaCDM cosmology, to study the properties and fate of substructures within a large sample of dark matter haloes. We find that…
The inner region of a subhalo's density distribution is particularly sensitive to dark matter microphysics, with alternative dark matter models leading to both cored and steeply-rising inner density profiles. This work investigates how the…
In the cold dark matter scenario, the smallest dark matter halos may be earth mass or smaller. These microhalos would be the densest dark matter objects in the Universe, making their accurate characterization important for astrophysical…
The properties of substructure in galaxy clusters, exquisitely probed by gravitational lensing, offer a stringent test of dark matter (DM) models. Combining strong- and weak-lensing data for massive clusters, we map their total mass --…
Observations of multiple-image gravitational lens systems suggest that the projected mass distributions of galaxy haloes may contain substantial inhomogeneities. The fraction of the halo mass in dense substructure is still highly uncertain,…
Small distortions in the images of Einstein rings or giant arcs offer the exciting prospect of detecting dark matter haloes or subhaloes of mass below $10^9$M$_{\odot}$, most of which are too small to have made a visible galaxy. A very…
The Milky Way's dark matter halo is expected to host numerous low-mass subhalos with no detectable associated stellar component. Such subhalos are invisible unless their dark matter annihilates to visible states such as photons. One of the…
We use N-body simulations to investigate the structure of dark halos in the standard Cold Dark Matter cosmogony. Halos are excised from simulations of cosmologically representative regions and are resimulated individually at high…
The cold dark matter (CDM) structure formation model predicts that about 5-10 percent of a typical galactic halo of mass $\sim 10^{12} \ms$ is in substructures with masses $\lesssim 10^8 \ms$. To directly detect such substructures, we…
We study the phase-space structure of a dark-matter halo formed in a high resolution simulation of a Lambda CDM cosmology. Our goal is to quantify how much substructure is left over from the inhomogeneous growth of the halo, and how it may…
We use a catalogue of stellar binaries with wide separations (up to 1 pc) identified by the Gaia satellite to constrain the presence of extended substructure within the Milky Way galaxy. Heating of the binaries through repeated encounters…
If the dark matter in the Universe is made of weakly self-interacting particles, they may self-annihilate and emit gamma-rays. We use high resolution numerical simulations to estimate directly the annihilation flux from the central regions…
We use a particle tagging technique to dynamically populate the N-body Via Lactea II high-resolution simulation with stars. The method is calibrated using the observed luminosity function of Milky Way satellites and the concentration of…
Measuring the distribution of mass on galaxy cluster scales is a crucial test of the Lambda CDM model, providing constraints on the nature of dark matter. Recent work investigating mass distributions of individual galaxy clusters using…