Detecting Dark Matter Substructures around the Milky Way with Gaia

Abstract

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" substructures remains elusive. Here, we present a detection method based on the small, but detectable, velocity changes that an orbiting substructure imposes on the stars in the MW disk. Using high-resolution numerical simulations we estimate that the new space telescope Gaia should detect the kinematic signatures of a few starless substructures provided the CDM paradigm holds. Such a measurement will provide unprecedented constraints on the primordial matter power spectrum at low-mass scales and offer a new handle onto the particle physics properties of dark matter.

14 pages, 11 figures, 4 tables, revised version accepted for publication in MNRAS

References in corpus (6)

• Massloss of galaxies due to a UV-background
• Bending and Breathing Modes of the Galactic Disk
• Substructure in bulk velocities of Milky Way disk stars
• Radial and vertical flows induced by galactic spiral arms: likely contributors to our "wobbly Galaxy''
• The Stellar Number Density Distribution in the Local Solar Neighborhood is North-South Asymmetric
• Substructure around M31 : Evolution and Effects

Cited by in corpus (47)

• Gaia Data Release 2: Mapping the Milky Way disc kinematics
• Not so lumpy after all: modeling the depletion of dark matter subhalos by Milky Way-like galaxies
• Footprints of the Sagittarius dwarf galaxy in the $Gaia$ data set
• The Large-Misalignment Mechanism for the Formation of Compact Axion Structures: Signatures from the QCD Axion to Fuzzy Dark Matter
• Shaken and Stirred: The Milky Way's Dark Substructures
• The echo of the bar buckling: phase-space spirals in Gaia DR2
• A fully cosmological model of a Monoceros-like ring
• Modelling the Galactic disc: perturbed distribution functions in the presence of spiral arms
• The properties of "dark" ΛCDM halos in the Local Group
• Modelling the Tucana III stream - a close passage with the LMC
• Emergence of the Gaia Phase Space Spirals from Bending Waves
• Bending Waves in the Milky Way's disc from halo substructure
• Modeling dark matter subhalos in a constrained galaxy: Global mass and boosted annihilation profiles
• The vertical effects of disc non-axisymmetries from perturbation theory: the case of the Galactic bar
• On the Power Spectrum of Dark Matter Substructure in Strong Gravitational Lenses
• Galactoseismology and the Local Density of Dark Matter
• Small-scale shear: Peeling off diffuse subhalos with gravitational waves
• Direct Detection of Dark Matter Substructure in Strong Lens Images with Convolutional Neural Networks
• Implications of Milky Way Substructures for the Nature of Dark Matter
• Spontaneous generation of bending waves in isolated Milky Way-like discs
• First Results on Dark Matter Substructure from Astrometric Weak Lensing
• Stellar Wakes from Dark Matter Subhalos
• Beyond subhalos: Probing the collective effect of the Universe's small-scale structure with gravitational lensing
• Faint objects in motion: the new frontier of high precision astrometry
• Extracting the Subhalo Mass Function from Strong Lens Images with Image Segmentation
• Vertical Oscillations of Fluid and Stellar Disks
• Ultracompact minihalos associated with stellar-mass primordial black holes
• Quantifying the power spectrum of small-scale structure in semi-analytic galaxies
• ALP dark matter with non-periodic potentials: parametric resonance, halo formation and gravitational signatures
• Pushing down the low-mass halo concentration frontier with the Lomonosov cosmological simulations
• Bending waves excited by irregular gas inflow along warps
• Out of sight, out of mind? The impact of correlated clustering in substructure lensing
• A Map of the Local Velocity Substructure in the Milky Way Disk
• Statistical challenges in the search for dark matter
• Decoding Dark Matter Substructure without Supervision
• Is it possible to discover a dark matter particle with an accelerator?
• Using Action Space Clustering to Constrain the Accretion History of Milky Way like Galaxies
• Deep learning the astrometric signature of dark matter substructure
• Binary Satellite Galaxies
• Inferring subhalo effective density slopes from strong lensing observations with neural likelihood-ratio estimation
• Fluorescent rings in star-free dark matter haloes
• Absolute astrometry in the next 50 years
• Sensitivity Estimation for Dark Matter Subhalos in Synthetic Gaia DR2 using Deep Learning
• Prospects for a local detection of dark matter with future missions to Uranus and Neptune
• The case for gravitational millilensing in the multiply--imaged quasar B1152+199
• Hunt for dark subhalos in the galactic stellar field using computer vision
• Structure of cosmic web in non-linear regime: the nearest neighbour and spherical contact distributions