Related papers: The Galactic potential and dark matter density fro…
Astrometric weak gravitational lensing is a powerful probe of the distribution of matter on sub-Galactic scales, which harbor important information about the fundamental nature of dark matter. We propose a novel method that utilizes angular…
We present a method to calculate gravitational potential gradients within regions containing few tens of thousands stars with known phase space coordinates. The central idea of the method is to calculate orbital arcs for each star within a…
We present the results of a new, non-parametric method to reconstruct the Galactic dark matter profile directly from observations. Using the latest kinematic data to track the total gravitational potential and the observed distribution of…
Measurements of the accelerations of stars enabled by time-series extreme-precision spectroscopic observations, from pulsar timing, and from eclipsing binary stars in the Solar Neighborhood offer insights into the mass distribution of the…
This report summarises progress made in estimating the local density of dark matter ($\rho_{\mathrm{DM,\odot}}$), a quantity that is especially important for dark matter direct detection experiments. We outline and compare the most common…
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 demonstrate that dark matter heating of gas clouds hundreds of parsecs from the Milky Way Galactic center provides a powerful new test of dark matter interactions. To illustrate, we set a leading bound on nucleon scattering for 10-100…
We present a novel, data-driven analysis of Galactic dynamics, using unsupervised machine learning -- in the form of density estimation with normalizing flows -- to learn the underlying phase space distribution of 6 million nearby stars…
Near-future surveys promise a dramatic improvement in the number and precision of astrometric, photometric and spectroscopic measurements of stars in the Milky Way's disk. We examine the impact of such surveys on our understanding of the…
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"…
In the coming decade the Gaia satellite will precisely measure the positions and velocities of millions of stars in the Galactic halo, including stars in many tidal streams. These streams, the products of hierarchical accretion of satellite…
We model vertical breathing mode perturbations in the Milky Way's stellar disc and study their effects on estimates of the local dark matter density, surface density, and vertical force. Evidence for these perturbations, which involve…
We present ClearPotential, a data-driven, three-dimensional measurement of the gravitational potential of the local Milky Way using unsupervised machine learning, without the symmetry assumptions, specific functional forms, and binning…
The gravitational potential of the Milky Way encodes information about the distribution of all matter -- including dark matter -- throughout the Galaxy. Gaia data release 3 has revealed a complex structure that necessitates flexible models…
Flat rotation curves in disk galaxies represent the main evidence for large amounts of surrounding dark matter. Despite of the difficulty in identifying the dark matter contribution to the total mass density in our Galaxy, stellar…
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…
High precision spectrographs can enable not only the discovery of exoplanets, but can also provide a fundamental measurement in Galactic dynamics. Over about ten year baselines, the expected change in the line-of-sight velocity due to the…
We present a new measurement of the mass of the Milky Way (MW) based on observed properties of its largest satellite galaxies, the Magellanic Clouds (MCs), and an assumed prior of a {\Lambda}CDM universe. The large, high-resolution Bolshoi…
We use ESA/Gaia astrometry together with SEGUE and LAMOST measurements of the GD-1 stellar stream to explore the improvement on the Galactic gravitational potential that these new data provide. Assuming a realistic universal model for the…
We use compiled high-precision pulsar timing measurements to directly measure the Galactic acceleration of binary pulsars relative to the Solar System barycenter. Given the vertical accelerations, we use the Poisson equation to derive the…