Related papers: Investigating dark matter substructure with pulsar…
The ground-breaking detections of gravitational waves from black hole mergers by LIGO have rekindled interest in primordial black holes (PBHs) and the possibility of dark matter being composed of PBHs. It has been suggested that PBHs of…
Chameleon fields are scalar fields whose mass depends on the ambient matter density. We investigate the effects of these fields on the growth of density perturbations on sub-galactic scales and the formation of the first dark matter halos.…
Through numerical simulations, we study the dissolution timescale of the Ursa Minor cold stellar clump, due to the combination of phase-mixing and gravitational encounters with compact dark substructures in the halo of Ursa Minor. We…
The existence (and abundance) of primordial black holes (PBHs) is governed by the power spectrum of primordial perturbations generated during inflation. So far no PBHs have been observed, and instead, increasingly stringent bounds on their…
We analyse the properties of substructures within dark matter halos (subhalos) using a set of high-resolution numerical simulations of the formation of structure in a Lambda-CDM Universe. Our simulation set includes 11 high-resolution…
If present in the early universe, primordial black holes (PBHs) will accrete matter and emit high-energy photons, altering the statistical properties of the {Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB)}. This mechanism has been used to constrain the…
The study of dark matter substructure through strong gravitational lensing has shown enormous promise in probing the properties of dark matter on sub-galactic scales. This approach has already been used to place strong constraints on a wide…
Several observations suggest the existence of super-massive black holes (SMBH) at the centers of giant galaxies. However the mechanism under which these objects form remains non completely understood. In this work we review an alternative…
The failure to find evidence for elementary particles that could serve as the constituents of dark matter brings to mind suggestions that dark matter might consist of massive compact objects (MACHOs). In particular, it has recently been…
The discovery of black-hole-binary mergers through their gravitational wave (GW) emission has reopened the exciting possibility that dark matter is made, at least partly, of primordial black holes (PBHs). However, this scenario is…
We show that dark matter substructure in galaxy-scale halos perturbs the time delays between images in strong gravitational lens systems. The variance of the effect depends on the subhalo mass function, scaling as the product of the…
We explore the effects of small scale structure on the formation and equilibrium of dark matter halos in a universe dominated by vacuum energy. We present the results of a suite of four N-body simulations, two with a LCDM initial power…
The recent discovery of gravitational waves from merging black holes has generated interest in primordial black holes as a possible component of the dark matter. In this paper, we show that pulsar timing may soon have sufficient data to…
Supermassive black holes and intermediate mass black holes are believed to exist in the Universe. There is no established astrophysical explanation for their origin and considerations have been made in the literature that those massive…
We demonstrate that pulsar timing measurements may potentially be able to detect the presence of dark matter substructure within our own galaxy. As dark matter substructure transits near the line-of-sight between a pulsar and an observer,…
The accuracy of the measurements of some astrophysical dynamical systems allows to constrain the existence of incredibly small gravitational perturbations. In particular, the internal Solar System dynamics (planets, Earth-Moon) opens up the…
We provide new constraints on the connection between galaxies in the local universe, identified by the Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS), and dark matter halos and their constituent substructures in the $\Lambda$CDM model using WMAP7…
Large-amplitude density perturbations may have collapsed during the radiation dominated epoch of the Universe to form primordial black holes (PBHs). There are several constraints to the abundance of PBHs that stem from evaporation or…
The formation and evolution of superdense clumps (or subhalos) is studied. Such clumps of dark matter (DM) can be produced by many mechanisms, most notably by spiky features in the spectrum of inflationary perturbations and by cosmological…
Conventional Cold Dark Matter cosmological models predict small scale structures, such as cuspy halos, which are in apparent conflict with observations. Several alternative scenarios based on modifying fundamental properties of the dark…