Related papers: Determining the local dark matter density with LAM…
Our recent estimates of galaxy counts and the luminosity density in the near-infrared (Keenan et al. 2010, 2012) indicated that the local universe may be under-dense on radial scales of several hundred megaparsecs (Mpc). Such a large-scale…
The distributions of normal matter and of dark matter in the Galaxy are coupled to each other as they both move in the common gravitational potential. In order to fully exploit this interplay and to derive the various properties of dark…
We present a statistical method to derive the stellar density profiles of the Milky Way from spectroscopic survey data, taking into account selection effects. We assume that the selection function of the spectroscopic survey is based on…
We investigate the dark matter density profile of the massive elliptical galaxy, NGC 1407, by constructing spherically symmetric Jeans models of its field star and globular cluster systems. Two major challenges in such models are the…
Galaxy counts and recent measurements of the luminosity density in the near-infrared (NIR) have indicated the possibility that the local universe may be under-dense on scales of several hundred megaparsecs. The presence of a large-scale…
Under the assumption of a simple and time-invariant gravitational potential, many Galactic dynamics techniques infer the Milky Way's mass and dark matter distribution from stellar kinematic observations. These methods typically rely on…
Despite strong evidence for the existence of large amounts of dark matter (DM) in our Universe, there is no direct indication of its presence in our own solar system. All estimates of the local DM density rely on extrapolating results on…
We probe the gravitational force perpendicular to the Galactic plane at the position of the Sun based on a sample of red giants, with measurements taken from the DR3 Gaia catalogue. Measurements far out of the Galactic plane up to 3.5 kpc…
The inner slope (gammadm) of the dark matter (DM) density profile of cosmological halos carries information about the properties of DM and/or baryonic processes affecting the halo gravitational potential. Cold DM cosmological simulations…
We present and apply rigorous dynamical modeling with which we infer unprecedented constraints on the stellar and dark matter mass distribution within our Milky Way (MW), based on large sets of phase-space data on individual stars.…
We determine the velocity distribution and space density of a volume complete sample of A and F stars, using parallaxes and proper motions from the Hipparcos satellite. We use these data to solve for the gravitational potential vertically…
(Abridged) We present mass models of a sample of 14 spiral and 14 S0 galaxies that constrain their stellar and dark matter content. For each galaxy we derive the stellar mass distribution from near-infrared photometry under the assumptions…
Weak gravitational lensing provides a direct statistical measure of the dark matter distribution. The variance is easiest to measure, which constrains the degenerate product \sigma_8\Omega^0.6. The degeneracy is broken by measuring the…
I review current efforts to measure the mean density of dark matter near the Sun. This encodes valuable dynamical information about our Galaxy and is also of great importance for 'direct detection' dark matter experiments. I discuss…
To determine the local dark matter density (LDMD) of the solar system is a classical problem in astronomy. Recently, a novel method of determining the LDMD from stellar distribution and vertical velocity dispersion profiles perpendicular to…
The spherical Jeans equation is a widely used tool for dynamical study of gravitating systems in astronomy. Here we test its efficacy in robustly weighing the mass of Milky Way analogues, given they need not be in equilibrium or even…
A recent study, making use of the number of horizontal branch stars observed in infrared photometric surveys and kinematic measurements of M-giant stars from the BRAVA survey, combined with N-body simulations of stellar populations, has…
We measured the bias and correlation factor of galaxies with respect to the dark matter using the aperture statistics including the aperture mass from weak gravitational lensing. The analysis was performed for three galaxy samples selected…
An accurate knowledge of the dark matter distribution in the Milky Way is of crucial importance for galaxy formation studies and current searches for particle dark matter. In this paper we set new dynamical constraints on the Galactic dark…
Studies of cluster mass and velocity anisotropy profiles are useful tests of dark matter models, and of the assembly history of clusters of galaxies. These studies might be affected by unknown systematics caused by projection effects. We…