Related papers: Probing the nature of dark matter particles with s…
The cold dark matter picture predicts an abundance of substructure within the Galactic halo. However, most substructures host no stars and can only be detected indirectly. Stellar streams present a promising probe of this dark substructure.…
Perturbations to stellar systems can reflect the gravitational influence of dark matter substructures. On scales much smaller than the size of a stellar system, we point out analytic connections between the stellar and dark matter…
Dark matter is one of the pillars of the current standard model of structure formation: it is assumed to constitute most of the matter in the Universe. However, it can so far only be probed indirectly through its gravitational effects, and…
For nearly 40 years, dark matter has been widely assumed to be cold and collisionless. Cold dark matter models make fundamental predictions for the behavior of dark matter on small (<10 kpc) scales. These predictions include cuspy density…
We study how the indirect observation of dark matter substructures in the Milky Way, using recent stellar stream studies, translates into constraints for different dark matter models. Particularly, we use the measured number of dark…
Cosmology and astrophysics provide various ways to study the properties of dark matter even if they have negligible non-gravitational interactions with the Standard Model particles and remain hidden. We study a type of hidden dark matter…
We explore an extended cosmological scenario where the dark matter is an admixture of cold and additional non-cold species. The mass and temperature of the non-cold dark matter particles are extracted from a number of cosmological…
Caustics are a generic feature of the nonlinear growth of structure in the dark matter distribution. If the dark matter were absolutely cold, its mass density would diverge at caustics, and the integrated annihilation probability would also…
The free streaming length of dark matter particles determines the abundance of structure on sub-galactic scales. We present a statistical technique, amendable to any parameterization of subhalo density profile and mass function, to probe…
The origin of dark matter as a thermal relic offers a compelling way in which the early universe was initially populated by dark matter. Alternative explanations typically appear exotic compared to the simplicity of thermal production.…
Stellar streams, long, thin streams of stars, have been used as sensitive probes of dark matter substructure for over two decades. Gravitational interactions between dark matter substructures and streams lead to the formation of low-density…
Astronomical observations from small galaxies to the largest scales in the universe can be consistently explained by the simple idea of dark matter. The nature of dark matter is however still unknown. Empirically it cannot be any of the…
The Cold Dark Matter theory of gravitationally-driven hierarchical structure formation has earned its status as a paradigm by explaining the distribution of matter over large spans of cosmic distance and time. However, its central tenet,…
Cold or Warm, the Dark Matter substructure spectrum must extend to objects with masses as low as $10^7 M_\odot$, according to the most recent Lyman-$\alpha$ measurements. Around a Milky Way-like galaxy, more than a thousand of these…
Dark matter constitutes the great majority of the matter content in the Universe, but its microscopic nature remains an intriguing mystery, with profound implications for particle physics, astrophysics and cosmology. Here we shed light on…
These lecture notes aim to provide an introduction to dark matter from the perspective of astrophysics/cosmology. We start with a rapid overview of cosmology, including the evolution of the Universe, its thermal history and structure…
The Cold Dark Matter paradigm predicts vast numbers of dark matter sub-halos to be orbiting in galactic halos. The sub-halos are detectable through the gaps they create gaps in stellar streams. The gap-rate is an integral over the density…
The cold dark matter model successfully explains both the emergence and evolution of cosmic structures on large scales and, when we include a cosmological constant, the properties of the homogeneous and isotropic Universe. However, the cold…
Observations of density profiles of galaxies and clusters constrain the properties of dark matter. Formation of stable halos by collisional fluids with very low mass particles appears as the most probable interpretation, while halos formed…
High-precision asteroseismic data provides an excellent opportunity to test theories of stellar evolution and new physics, such as the properties of the dark matter (DM) of the Universe. Here we will show that some models of DM lead to…