Journal
MONTHLY NOTICES OF THE ROYAL ASTRONOMICAL SOCIETY
Volume 446, Issue 1, Pages 1000-1012Publisher
OXFORD UNIV PRESS
DOI: 10.1093/mnras/stu2147
Keywords
Galaxy: kinematics and dynamics; galaxies: haloes; dark matter
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Funding
- NASA through Hubble Fellowship by the Space Telescope Science Institute [HF-51304.01-A]
- NASA [NAS 5-26555]
- ERC [267117]
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Cold dark matter (CDM) theory, a pillar of modern cosmology and astrophysics, predicts the existence of a large number of starless dark matter haloes 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 disc. 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 potentially presents a new avenue to explore the particle physics properties of dark matter.
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