Related papers: Molecular dark matter in galaxies

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…

The annihilation of huge quantities of captured dark matter (DM) particles inside low-mass stars has been shown to change some of the stellar properties, such as the star's effective temperature or the way the energy is transported…

Gravitational potential fluctuations driven by bursty star formation can kinematically 'heat up' dark matter at the centres of dwarf galaxies. A key prediction of such models is that, at a fixed dark matter halo mass, dwarfs with a higher…

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…

Massive stars play an important role in shaping the structure of galaxies. Infrared dark clouds (IRDCs), with their low temperatures and high densities, have been identified as the potential birthplaces of massive stars. In order to…

Dense low mass cores in nearby clouds like Taurus and Auriga are some of the simplest sites currently forming stars like our Sun. Because of their simplicity and proximity, dense cores offer the clearest view of the different phases of star…

Collisionless particles, such as cold dark matter, interact only by gravity and do not have any associated length scale, therefore the dark halos of galaxies should have negligible core radii. This expectation has been supported by…

Massive stars are very rare, but their extreme luminosities make them both the only type of young star we can observe in distant galaxies and the dominant energy sources in the universe today. They form rarely because efficient radiative…

Carbon monoxide (CO) is the primary tracer for interstellar clouds where stars form, yet CO has never been detected in galaxies with an Oxygen abundance relative to Hydrogen less than 20% of solar, even though such low metallicity galaxies…

In the last few years new evidence has been presented for the presence of ongoing massive star formation in the outer HI disks of galaxies. These discoveries strongly suggest that precursor molecular gas must also be present in some…

If dark matter particles pair annihilate into stable Standard Model particles, a population of energetic, non-thermal electrons and positrons is necessarily produced. The secondary radiation resulting from the energy losses of this…

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…

Observations of molecular clouds in metal-poor environments typically find that they have much higher star formation rates than one would expect based on their observed CO luminosities and the molecular gas masses that are inferred from…

Two forms are suggested for the energy-momentum source term associated with an aggregate of dark matter (with the properties described in Paper I). Both have large pressure-like components which dominate the density terms. Using one form a…

Infrared dark clouds (IRDCs) are cold and dense reservoirs of gas potentially available to form stars. Many of these clouds are likely to be pristine structures representing the initial conditions for star formation. The study presented…

We test the hypothesis that the starless cores may be gravitationally bound clouds supported largely by thermal pressure by comparing observed molecular line spectra to theoretical spectra produced by a simulation that includes…

We study particle decay as the origin of dark radiation. After elaborating general properties and useful parametrisations we provide model-independent and easy-to-use constraints from nucleosynthesis, the cosmic microwave background and…

The formation and evolution of superdense clumps (or subhalos) is studied. Such clumps of dark matter (DM) can be produced by many mechanisms, most notably by spiky features in the spectrum of inflationary perturbations and by cosmological…

It has been known for more than 30 years that star formation in giant molecular clouds (GMCs) is slow, in the sense that only ~1% of the gas forms stars every free-fall time. This result is entirely independent of any particular model of…

We investigate the condition for the formation of micron-sized grains in dense cores of molecular clouds. This is motivated by the detection of the mid-infrared emission from deep inside a number of dense cores, the so-called `coreshine,'…