Dr Harry Desmond

Abstract:

We set constraints on the dark matter halo mass and concentration of ∼22 000 individual galaxies visible both in H I (from the ALFALFA survey) and optical light (from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey). This is achieved by combining two Bayesian models, one for the H I line width as a function of the stellar and neutral hydrogen mass distributions in a galaxy using kinematic modelling, and the other for the galaxy’s total baryonic mass using the technique of inverse subhalo abundance matching. We hence quantify the constraining power on halo properties of spectroscopic and photometric observations, and assess their consistency. We find good agreement between the two sets of posteriors, although there is a sizeable population of low-line width galaxies that favour significantly smaller dynamical masses than expected from abundance matching (especially for cuspy halo profiles). Abundance matching provides significantly more stringent bounds on halo properties than the H I line width, even with a mass–concentration prior included, although combining the two provides a mean gain of 40 per cent for the sample when fitting an NFW profile. We also use our kinematic posteriors to construct a baryonic mass–halo mass relation, which we find to be near power law, and with a somewhat shallower slope than expected from abundance matching. Our method demonstrates the potential of combining photometric and spectroscopic observations to precisely map out the dark matter distribution at the galaxy scale using upcoming H I surveys such as the SKA.

Abstract:

Decaying or annihilating dark matter particles could be detected through gamma-ray emission from the species they decay or annihilate into. This is usually done by modeling the flux from specific dark matter-rich objects such as the Milky Way halo, Local Group dwarfs, and nearby groups. However, these objects are expected to have significant emission from baryonic processes as well, and the analyses discard gamma-ray data over most of the sky. Here we construct full-sky templates for gamma-ray flux from the large-scale structure within ∼200 Mpc by means of a suite of constrained N-body simulations (csiborg) produced using the Bayesian Origin Reconstruction from Galaxies algorithm. Marginalizing over uncertainties in this reconstruction, small-scale structure, and parameters describing astrophysical contributions to the observed gamma-ray sky, we compare to observations from the Fermi Large Area Telescope to constrain dark matter annihilation cross sections and decay rates through a Markov chain Monte Carlo analysis. We rule out the thermal relic cross section for s-wave annihilation for all mχ7 GeV/c2 at 95% confidence if the annihilation produces gluons or quarks less massive than the bottom quark. We infer a contribution to the gamma-ray sky with the same spatial distribution as dark matter decay at 3.3σ. Although this could be due to dark matter decay via these channels with a decay rate Γ≈6×10-28 s-1, we find that a power-law spectrum of index p=-2.75-0.46+0.71, likely of baryonic origin, is preferred by the data.