Related papers: The Galactic Halo and CDM
Our current understanding of how dark matter (DM) is distributed within the Milky Way halo, particularly in the solar neighborhood, is based on either careful studies of the local stellar orbits, model assumptions on the global shape of the…
Well-motivated particle physics theories predict the existence of particles (such as sterile neutrinos) which acquire non-negligible thermal velocities in the early universe. These particles could behave as warm dark matter (WDM) and…
Recent observations indicate that dark matter haloes have flat central density profiles. Cosmological simulations with non-baryonic dark matter predict however self similar haloes with central density cusps. This contradiction has lead to…
The shape and orientation of dark matter (DM) halos are sensitive to the micro-physics of the DM particle, yet in many mass models, the symmetry axes of the Milky Way's DM halo are often assumed to be aligned with the symmetry axes of the…
The defining characteristic of the cold dark matter (CDM) hypothesis is the presence of a very large number of low-mass haloes, too small to have made a visible galaxy. Other hypotheses for the nature of the dark matter, such as warm dark…
We analyse a high resolution simulation of the formation of a cluster's dark-matter halo in a $\Lambda$CDM cosmology (Springel et al. 2001). The resolution achieved allows us to map the phase-space structure in detail, and characterize its…
In the standard Cold Dark Matter (CDM) theory for understanding the formation of structure in the universe, there exists a tight connection between the properties of dark matter (DM) haloes, and their formation epochs. Such relation can be…
In the $\Lambda$-CDM paradigm, the dark halo governs the gravitational potential within which a galaxy can form and evolve. In this Letter we show that the present-day inner ($r<50\text{ kpc}$) dark halo can be significantly misaligned with…
Current data suggest that the central mass densities $\rho_0$ and phase-space densities $Q\equiv\rho_0/\sigma_V^3$ of cosmological halos in the present universe are correlated with their velocity dispersions $\sigma_V$ over a very wide…
The infall of the Large Magellanic Cloud (LMC) into the Milky Way's halo impacts the distribution of stars and dark matter in our Galaxy. Mapping the observational consequences of this encounter can inform us about the properties of both…
Stars and their kinematics provide one of the tools available for studies of the shapes of galaxies and their halos. In this review I focus on two specific applications: the shape of the Milky Way dark halo and the shape of the LMC disk.…
In the thermal dark matter (DM) paradigm, primordial interactions between DM and Standard Model particles are responsible for the observed DM relic density. In Boehm et al. (2014), we showed that weak-strength interactions between DM and…
An anti-correlation between the central density of the dark matter halo ($\rho_{150,\ {\rm DM}}$) and the pericentric distances ($r_{p}$) of the Milky Way's (MW's) dwarf spheroidal galaxies (dSphs) has been reported in the literature. The…
Observations show that about the 20% of the Universe is composed by invisible (dark) matter (DM), for which many candidates have been proposed. In particular, the anomalous behavior of rotational curves of galaxies (i.e. the flattening at…
The shape distortion of the presumed Milky Way dark matter halo can impact the local density of dark matter and thus the direct detection program. We examine the population of galactic rotation curves measured by SPARC and fit them to dark…
We present minimum chi-squared fits of power law and Hernquist density profiles to F-turnoff stars in eight 2.5 deg wide stripes of SDSS data: five in the North Galactic Cap and three in the South Galactic cap. Portions of the stellar…
We consider the possibility that the Milky Way's dark matter halo possesses a non vanishing equation of state. Consequently, we evaluate the contribution due to the speed of sound, assuming that the dark matter content of the galaxy behaves…
In this paper we present strong evidence for a core in the density distribution of the dark halo around a (dwarf) galaxy. DDO 47 has a rotation curve that increases linearly from the first data point, at 300 pc, up to to the last one, at 5…
We study the spatial distribution of satellite galaxies by assuming that they follow the dark matter distribution. This assumption is supported by semi-analytical studies based on high-resolution numerical simulations. We find that for a…
The smallest dark matter haloes are the first objects to form in the hierarchical structure formation of cold dark matter (CDM) cosmology and are expected to be the densest and most fundamental building blocks of CDM structures in our…