Related papers: Hunt for dark subhalos in the galactic stellar fie…
Despite the Milky Way's proximity to us, our knowledge of its dark matter halo is fairly limited, and there is still considerable uncertainty in its halo mass. Many past techniques have been limited by assumptions such as the Galaxy being…
The abundance of dark matter (DM) subhalos orbiting a host galaxy is a generic prediction of the cosmological framework, and is a promising way to constrain the nature of DM. In this paper, we investigate the use of machine learning-based…
Dwarf galaxies are small, dark matter-dominated galaxies, some of which are embedded within the Milky Way. Their lack of baryonic matter (e.g., stars and gas) makes them perfect test beds for probing the properties of dark matter --…
Due to poor observational constraints on the low-mass end of the subhalo mass function, the detection of dark matter (DM) subhalos on sub-galactic scales would provide valuable information about the nature of DM. Stellar wakes, induced by…
We propose a novel method utilizing stellar kinematic data to detect low-mass substructure in the Milky Way's dark matter halo. By probing characteristic wakes that a passing dark matter subhalo leaves in the phase space distribution of…
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…
Dark matter subhalos, predicted in large numbers in the cold dark matter scenario, should have an impact on particle dark matter searches. Recent results show that tidal disruption of these objects in computer simulations is over-efficient…
Dark matter substructures are interesting since they can reveal the properties of dark matter. Collisionless N-body simulations of cold dark matter show more substructures compared with the population of dwarf galaxy satellites observed in…
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…
Cold Dark Matter (CDM) theory, a pillar of modern cosmology and astrophysics, predicts the existence of a large number of starless dark matter halos surrounding the Milky Way (MW). However, clear observational evidence of these "dark"…
The identity of dark matter is one of the key outstanding problems in both particle and astrophysics. In this thesis, I describe a number of complementary searches for particle dark matter. I discuss how the impact of dark matter on stars…
Dark matter comprises the bulk of the matter in the universe but its particle nature and cosmological origin remain mysterious. Knowledge of the dark matter density distribution in the Milky Way Galaxy is crucial to both our understanding…
Although numerous dynamical techniques have been developed to estimate the total dark matter halo mass of the Milky Way, it remains poorly constrained, with typical systematic uncertainties of 0.3 dex. In this study, we apply a neural…
For nearly a century, more mass has been measured in galaxies than is contained in the luminous stars and gas. Through continual advances in observations and theory, it has become clear that the dark matter in galaxies is not comprised of…
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…
Strong gravitational lensing is a promising way of uncovering the nature of dark matter, by finding perturbations to images that cannot be well accounted for by modeling the lens galaxy without additional structure, be it subhalos (smaller…
Tens of thousands of galaxy-galaxy strong lensing systems are expected to be discovered by the end of the decade. These will form a vast new dataset that can be used to probe subgalactic dark matter structures through its gravitational…
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…
The predicted abundance and properties of the low-mass substructures embedded inside larger dark matter haloes differ sharply among alternative dark matter models. Too small to host galaxies themselves, these subhaloes may still be detected…
Cold dark matter subhalos are expected to populate galaxies in numbers. If dark matter self-annihilates, these objects turn into prime targets for indirect searches, in particular with gamma-ray telescopes. Incidentally, the Fermi-LAT…