Related papers: Evidence for Ring Caustics in the Milky Way
The outer disk of the Milky Way Galaxy is warped and flared. Several mechanisms have been proposed to explain these phenomena, but none have quantitatively reproduced both features. Recent work has demonstrated that the Galactic stellar…
We analyze the behavior of axion dark matter before it falls into a galactic gravitational potential well. The axions thermalize sufficiently fast by gravitational self-interactions that almost all go to their lowest energy state consistent…
We review most dynamical constraints on the gravitational field of spiral galaxies in general, and of the Milky Way in particular. Such constraints are of prime importance for determining the characteristics of the putative dark matter…
We study how structural properties of globular clusters and dwarf galaxies are linked to their orbits in the Milky Way halo. From the inner to the outer halo, orbital energy increases and stellar-systems gradually move out of internal…
We study the vertical stellar distribution of the Milky Way thin disk in detail with particular focus on the outer disk. We treat the galactic disk as a gravitationally coupled, three-component system consisting of stars, atomic hydrogen…
Polar ring galaxies, where matter is in equilibrium in perpendicular orbits around spiral galaxies, are ideal objects to probe the 3D shapes of dark matter halos. The conditions to constrain the halos are that the perpendicular system does…
Context. Gas within a galaxy is forced to establish pressure balance against gravitational forces. The shape of an unperturbed gaseous disk can be used to constrain dark matter models. Aims. We derive the 3-D HI volume density distribution…
The first and second moments of stellar velocities encode important information about the formation history of the Galactic halo. However, due to the lack of tangential motion and inaccurate distances of the halo stars, the velocity moments…
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…
In the frame of indirect dark matter searches we investigate the flux of high-energy $\gamma$-ray photons produced by annihilation of dark matter in caustics within our Galaxy under the hypothesis that the bulk of dark matter is composed of…
Making robust predictions for the phase space distribution of dark matter at the solar neighbourhood is vital for dark matter direct detection experiments. To date, almost all such predictions have been based on simulations that model the…
There are compelling reasons to believe that the dark matter of the universe is constituted, in large part, by non-baryonic collisionless particles with very small primordial velocity dispersion. Such particles are called cold dark matter…
The distribution of dark matter around galactic or cluster halos has usually been assumed to be approximately isothermal with a non-zero core radius, which is expected to be of the order of the size of the visible matter distribution.…
A straightforward determination of the circular-speed curve vc(R) of the Milky Way suggests that near the Sun, vc starts to rise approximately linearly with R. If this result were correct, the Galactic mass density would have to be…
We predict that there is a population of low-luminosity dwarf galaxies orbiting within the halo of the Milky Way that have surface brightnesses low enough to have escaped detection in star-count surveys. The overall count of stealth…
It is now generally believed that galaxies were built up through gravitational amplification of primordial fluctuations and the subsequent merging of smaller precursor structures. The stars of the structures that assembled to form the Milky…
In the local (redshift z~0) Universe, collisional ring galaxies make up only ~0.01% of galaxies and are formed by head-on galactic collisions that trigger radially propagating density waves. These striking systems provide key snapshots for…
In its first part, this paper summarizes recent work on the mass and shape of the Galactic dark halo. The second part presents a review of the large-scale structure of the Milky Way, and of the evidence that the inner Galaxy is dominated by…
There is increasing evidence now from simulations and observations that the centre of dark matter halo in a Milky Way type galaxy could be off-centred by a few 100 pc w.r.t. the galactic disc. We study the effect of such an offset halo on…
Dwarf galaxies populating the Galactic halo are assumed to host the largest fractions of dark matter, as calculated from their velocity dispersions. Their major axes are preferentially aligned with the Vast Polar Structure (VPOS) that is…