We review the~current status of the~study of rotation curve (RC) of the~Milky Way, and~present a~unified RC from the~Galactic Center to the galacto-centric distance of about 100 kpc. The~RC is used to directly calculate the~distribution of the~surface mass density (SMD). We then propose a~method to derive the~distribution of dark matter (DM) density in the~in the~Milky Way using the~SMD distribution. The~best-fit dark halo profile yielded a local DM density of $ρ_\odot = 0.36\pm 0.02$ GeV/cc. We also review the~estimations of the~local DM density in the~last decade, and~show that the~value is converging to a~value at $ρ_\odot=0.39\pm 0.09$ GeV/cc.
The flow of dark matter into the Milky Way and Large Magellanic Cloud in a model for the gravitational field of the neighboring galaxies yields a growth history for the dark matter halo of the Milky Way that ends up with angular momentum roughly in the observed direction, and it produces a dark matter stream around the Large Magellanic Cloud that resembles the Magellanic Stream.
The inconsistency of the observed rotational velocity curve of the Milky Way with the current theory of gravitational dynamics is well documented. The curve implies the presence of significantly more mass, or dark matter, than is observable. Current models estimate the amount of dark matter to be of the order of 85% of total matter. This paper explores relativistic neutrinos as a potential source of dark matter and proposes a crude binary star accretion model mechanism at the centre of the Milky Way for their production. The results show this to be consistent with the current theory of gravita…
The circular rotation speed of the Milky Way at the solar radius, Theta_o, has been estimated to be 220 km/s by fitting the maximum velocity of HI emission as a function of Galactic longitude. This result is in tension with a recent estimate of Theta_o=240 km/s, based on VLBI parallaxes and proper motions from the BeSSeL and VERA surveys for large numbers of high-mass star forming regions across the Milky Way. We find that the rotation curve best fitted to the VLBI data is slightly curved, and that this curvature results in a biased estimate of Theta_o from the HI data when a flat rotation cur…
In the present work we derive an analytical expression for the mass density of an object with spherical symmetry, whose corresponding potential allows obtaining a circular velocity around it that is in agreement with the observed rotation curve of galaxies. The rotation curve of our galaxy is analyzed, determining the properties of the central object, its radius and mass whose value obtained is very close to that reported in the literature.
Grand rotation curves (GRC) within ~400 kpc of M31 and the Milky Way were constructed by combining disk rotation velocities and radial velocities of satellite galaxies and globular clusters. The GRC for the Milky Way was revised using the most recent Solar rotation velocity. The derived GRCs were deconvolved into a de Vaucouleurs bulge, exponential disk, and a dark halo with the Navarro-Frenk-White (NFW) density profile by the least chi-squares fitting. Comparison of the best-fit parameters revealed similarity of the disks and bulges of the two galaxies, whereas the dark halo mass of M31 was f…
We present a new analysis of the observed perturbations of the HI disk of the Milky Way to infer the existence of a dark sub-halo that tidally interacted with the Milky Way disk. We examine tidal interactions between perturbing dark sub-halos and the gas disk of the Milky Way using high resolution Smoothed Particle Hydrodynamics (SPH) simulations. We compare our results to the observed HI map of the Milky Way to find that the Fourier amplitudes of the planar disturbances are best-fit by a perturbing dark sub-halo with a mass that is one-hundredth of the Milky Way with a pericentric distance of…
Recently, the Cubic Galileon Gravity (CGG) model has been suggested as an alternative gravity theory to General Relativity. The model consists of an extra field potential term which can serve as the `fifth-force'. In this article, we examine the possibility whether this extra force term can explain the missing mass problem in galaxies without the help of dark matter. By using the Milky Way rotation curve and the Spitzer Photomery & Accurate Rotation Curves (SPARC) data, we show that this CGG model can satisfactorily explain the shapes of these rotation curves without dark matter. The CGG model…
There is an increasing number of recent observational results which show that some globular clusters exhibit internal rotation while they travel along their orbital trajectories around the Milky Way center. Based on these findings, we looked for any relationship between the inclination angles of the globular clusters' orbits with respect to the Milky Way plane and those of their rotation. We discovered that the relative inclination, in the sense rotation axis inclination - orbit axis inclination, is a function of the globular cluster's orbit inclination. Rotation and orbit axes are aligned for…
Flat rotation curves of spiral galaxies are considered as an evidence for dark matter, but the rotation curve of the Milky Way is difficult to measure. Various objects were used to track the rotation curve in the outer parts of the Galaxy, but most studies rely on incomplete kinematical information and inaccurate distances. Here, we use a sample of 773 Classical Cepheids with precise distances based on mid-infrared period-luminosity relations coupled with proper motions and radial velocities from Gaia to construct the accurate rotation curve of the Milky Way up to the distance of ~20 kpc from …
[PASJ Review Paper] Rotation curves are the basic tool for deriving the distribution of mass in spiral galaxies. In this review, we describe various methods to measure rotation curves in the Milky Way and spiral galaxies. We then describe two major methods to calculate the mass distribution using the rotation curve. By the direct method, the mass is calculated from rotation velocities without employing mass models. By the decomposition method, the rotation curve is deconvolved into multiple mass components by model fitting assuming a black hole, bulge, exponential disk and dark halo. The decom…
We test a particular theory of dark matter in which dark matter axions form ring "caustics" in the plane of the Milky Way against actual observations of Milky Way stars. According to this theory, cold, collisionless dark matter particles with angular momentum flow in and out of the Milky Way on sheets. These flows form caustic rings (at the positions of the rings, the density of the flow is formally infinite) at the locations of closest approach to the Galactic center. We show that the caustic ring dark matter theory reproduces a roughly logarithmic halo, with large perturbations near the ring…
Two alternative theories to dark matter are investigated by testing their ability to describe consistently the dynamics of the Milky Way. The first one refers to a modified gravity theory having a running gravitational constant and the second assumes that dark matter halos are constituted by a Bose-Einstein condensation. The parameters of each model as well as those characterizing the stellar subsystems of the Galaxy were estimated by fitting the rotation curve of the Milky Way. Then, using these parameters, the vertical acceleration profile at the solar position was computed and compared with…
Microlensing provides a unique tool to break the stellar to dark matter degeneracy in the inner Milky Way. We combine N-body dynamical models fitted to the Milky Way's Boxy/Peanut bulge with exponential disk models outside this, and compute the microlensing properties. Considering the range of models consistent with the revised MOA-II data, we find low dark matter fractions in the inner Galaxy: at the peak of their stellar rotation curve a fraction $f_v=(0.88\pm0.07)$ of the circular velocity is baryonic (at $1σ$, $f_v > 0.72$ at $2σ$). These results are in agreement with constraints from the …
It has recently been shown that the Large Magellanic Cloud (LMC) has a substantial effect on the Milky Way's stellar halo and stellar streams. Here, we explore how deformations of the Milky Way and LMC's dark matter haloes affect stellar streams, and whether these effects are observable. In particular, we focus on the Orphan-Chenab (OC) stream which passes particularly close to the LMC, and spans a large portion of the Milky Way's halo. We represent the Milky Way--LMC system using basis function expansions that capture their evolution in an $N$-body simulation. We present the properties of thi…
We investigate the dark matter profile of the Milky Way using the observed rotation curve data out to 100 kpc. The baryonic matter of the Milky Way is divided into bulge, disk and gas components, and each component is modelled using various possible mass profiles available in literature. The arbitrary combination of seven bulge profiles, four disk profiles and two gas profiles results in fifty-six baryon models. These baryon models are combined with one of the four dark matter profiles: Burkert profile, core-modified profile, pseudo-isothermal profile and NFW profile, to fit the observed rotat…
The following is a comment on the recent letter by Iocco et al. (2015, arXiv:1502.03821) where the authors claim to have found "...convincing proof of the existence of dark matter...". The letter in question presents a compilation of recent rotation curve observations for the Milky Way, together with Newtonian rotation curve estimates based on recent baryonic matter distribution measurements. A mismatch between the former and the latter is then presented as "evidence for dark matter". Here we show that the reported discrepancy is the well known gravitational anomaly which consistently appears …
In this paper we model the vertical structure of mass distribution of the Milky Way galaxy in the framework of a finite-width global disk model. Assuming the Galactic rotation curve only, we test inside the solar orbit the predictions of the model for two measurable and unrelated to each other processes: the gravitational microlensing that allows to fix the disk width-scale by the best fit to measurements, and the vertical gradient of rotation modelled in the quasi-circular orbits approximation. The former is sensitive to the gravitating mass in compact objects and the latter is sensitive to a…
We propose a new model for the dark matter halo of the Milky Way that fits the properties of the stellar stream associated with the Sagittarius dwarf galaxy. Our dark halo is oblate with q_z = 0.9 for r < 10 kpc, and can be made to follow the Law & Majewski model at larger radii. However, we find that the dynamical perturbations induced by the Large Magellanic Cloud on the orbit of Sgr cannot be neglected when modeling its streams. When taken into account, this leads us to constrain the Galaxy's outer halo shape to have minor-to-major axis ratio (c/a)_Φ= 0.8 and intermediate-to-major axis rati…
We develop a novel Bayesian methodology aimed at reliably and precisely inferring the distribution of dark matter within the Milky Way using rotation curve data. We identify a subset of the available rotation curve tracers that are mutually consistent with each other, thus eliminating data sets that might suffer from systematic bias. We investigate three different models for the mass distribution of the luminous (baryonic) component that bracket the range of likely morphologies. We demonstrate the statistical performance of our method on simulated data in terms of coverage, fractional distance…
In the fundamental quest of the rotation curve of the Milky Way, the tangent-point (TP) method has long been the simplest way to infer velocities for the inner, low latitude regions of the Galactic disk from observations of the gas component. We test the validity of the method on realistic gas distribution and kinematics of the Milky Way, using a numerical simulation of the Galaxy. We show that the resulting velocity profile strongly deviates from the true rotation curve of the simulation, as it overstimates it in the central regions, and underestimates it around the bar corotation. Also, its …
Using atomic hydrogen (HI) data from the VLA Galactic Plane Survey we measure the HI terminal velocity as a function of longitude for the first quadrant of the Milky Way. We use these data, together with our previous work on the fourth Galactic quadrant, to produce a densely sampled, uniformly measured, rotation curve of the Northern and Southern Milky Way between $3~{\rm kpc} < R < 8~{\rm kpc}$. We determine a new joint rotation curve fit for the first and fourth quadrants, which is consistent with the fit we published in McClure-Griffiths \& Dickey (2007) and can be used for estimating kinem…
Milky Way Dynamics Favor Dark Matter over Modified Gravity Models
Purple Mountain Observatory, Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院紫金山天文台）；University of Science and Technology of China（中国科学技术大学）；National Astronomical Observatories, Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院国家天文台）；University of Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院大学）；University of Saint Andrews（圣安德鲁斯大学）
We compare the results of high-resolution simulations of individual dark matter subhalos evolving in external tidal fields with and without baryonic bulge and disk components, where the average dark matter particle mass is three orders of magnitude smaller than cosmological zoom-in simulations of galaxy formation. The Via Lactea II simulation is used to setup our initial conditions and provides a basis for our simulations of subhalos in a dark matter-only tidal field, while an observationally motivated model for the Milky Way is used for the tidal field that is comprised of a dark matter halo,…
We search for signs of rotation in the subsystems of the Milky Way and M31 that are defined by their satellite galaxies, their globular cluster populations, and their BHB stars. A set of simple distribution functions are introduced to describe anisotropic and rotating stellar populations embedded in dark haloes of approximate Navarro-Frenk-White form. The BHB stars in the Milky Way halo exhibit a dichotomy between a prograde rotating, comparatively metal-rich component ([Fe/H] > -2) and a retrograde rotating, comparatively metal-poor ([Fe/H] < -2) component. The prograde metal-rich population …
We use distant Blue Horizontal Branch stars with Galactocentric distances 16 < r/kpc < 48 as kinematic tracers of the Milky Way dark halo. We model the tracer density as an oblate, power-law embedded within a spherical power-law potential. Using a distribution function method, we estimate the overall power-law potential and the velocity anisotropy of the halo tracers. We measure the slope of the potential to be gamma ~ 0.4 and the overall mass within 50 kpc is ~ 4 x 10^11 M_sol. The tracer velocity anisotropy is radially biased with beta ~ 0.5, which is in good agreement with local solar neigh…
The correlation between fresh gas accretion onto haloes and galaxy star formation is critical to understanding galaxy formation. Different theoretical models have predicted different correlation strengths between halo accretion rates and galaxy star formation rates, ranging from strong positive correlations to little or no correlation. Here, we present a technique to observationally measure this correlation strength for isolated Milky Way-mass galaxies with $z < 0.123$. This technique is based on correlations between dark matter accretion rates and the projected density profile of neighbouring…
MilkyWay@home is a volunteer computing project that allows people from every country in the world to volunteer their otherwise idle processors to Milky Way research. Currently, more than 25,000 people (150,000 since November 9, 2007) contribute about half a PetaFLOPS of computing power to our project. We currently run two types of applications: one application fits the spatial density profile of tidal streams using statistical photometric parallax, and the other application finds the N-body simulation parameters that produce tidal streams that best match the measured density profile of known t…
We present $\texttt{galkin}$, a novel compilation of kinematic measurements tracing the rotation curve of our Galaxy, together with a tool to treat the data. The compilation is optimised to Galactocentric radii between 3 and 20 kpc and includes the kinematics of gas, stars and masers in a total of 2780 measurements carefully collected from almost four decades of literature. A simple, user-friendly tool is provided to select, treat and retrieve the data of all source references considered. This tool is especially designed to facilitate the use of kinematic data in dynamical studies of the Milky…
We present a study of the vertical magnetic field of the Milky Way towards the Galactic poles, determined from observations of Faraday rotation toward more than 1000 polarized extragalactic radio sources at Galactic latitudes |b| > 77 degs, using the Westerbork Radio Synthesis Telescope and the Australia Telescope Compact Array. We find median rotation measures (RMs) of 0.0 +/- 0.5 rad/m^2 and +6.3 +/- 0.7 rad/m^2 toward the north and south Galactic poles, respectively, demonstrating that there is no coherent vertical magnetic field in the Milky Way at the Sun's position. If this is a global p…
According to our current cosmological model, galaxies like the Milky Way are expected to experience many mergers over their lifetimes. The most massive of the merging galaxies will be dragged towards the disc-plane, depositing stars and dark matter into an accreted disc structure. In this work, we utilize the chemo-dynamical template developed in Ruchti et al. to hunt for accreted stars. We apply the template to a sample of 4,675 stars in the third internal data release from the Gaia-ESO Spectroscopic Survey. We find a significant component of accreted halo stars, but find no evidence of an ac…
We study the distribution of the Milky Way satellites stellar and dark matter debris. For the first time we address the question of the tidal disruption of satellites in simulations by utilising simultaneously a) a realistic set of orbits extracted from cosmological simulations, b) a three component host galaxy with live halo, disc and bulge components, and c) satellites from hydrodynamical simulations. We analyse the statistical properties of the satellite debris of all massive galaxies reaching the inner Milky Way on a timescale of 2 Gyr. Up to 80$\%$ of the dark matter is stripped from the …
Dwarf spheroidal galaxies are the most common type of galaxies, and are the most dark matter dominated objects in the Universe. Therefore, they are ideal laboratories to test any dark matter model. The Bose-Einstein condensate/scalar field dark matter model considers that the dark matter is composed by spinless-ultra-light particles which can be described by a scalar field. This model is an alternative to the $Λ$-cold dark matter model. In this work I study the kinematics of the dwarf spheroidal satellite galaxies of the Milky Way and Andromeda, under the scalar field/BEC dark matter paradigm …
We investigate the temperature distribution of CO-dark molecular hydrogen (H2) in a series of disk galaxies simulated using the AREPO moving-mesh code. In conditions similar to those in the Milky Way, we find that H2 has a flat temperature distribution ranging from 10 - 100 K. At $T < 30$ K the gas is almost fully molecular and has a high CO content, whereas at $T > 30$ K, the H2 fraction spans a broader range and the CO content is small, allowing us to classify gas in these two regimes as CO-bright and CO-dark, respectively. The mean sound speed in the CO-dark H2 is 0.64 km/s, significantly l…
The cuspy central density profiles of cold dark matter (CDM) haloes make them highly resilient to disruption by tides. Self-interactions between dark matter particles, or the cycling of baryons, may result in the formation of a constant-density core which would make haloes more susceptible to tidal disruption. We use N-body simulations to study the evolution of NFW-like "cored" subhaloes in the tidal field of a massive host, and identify the criteria and timescales for full tidal disruption. Our results imply that the survival of Milky Way satellites places constraints on the sizes of dark mat…
Recent studies have shown that dark matter with a superfluid phase in which phonons mediate a long-distance force gives rise to the phenomenologically well-established regularities of Modified Newtonian Dynamics (MOND). Superfluid dark matter, therefore, has emerged as a promising explanation for astrophysical observations by combining the benefits of both particle dark matter and MOND, or its relativistic completions, respectively. We here investigate whether superfluid dark matter can reproduce the observed Milky Way rotation curve for $ R < 25\,\rm{kpc}$ and are able to answer this question…
We have recently introduced a new model for the distribution of dark matter (DM) in galaxies based on a self-gravitating system of massive fermions at finite temperatures, the Ruffini-Argüelles-Rueda (RAR) model. We show that this model, for fermion masses in the keV range, explains the DM halo of the Galaxy and predicts the existence of a denser quantum core at the center. We demonstrate here that the introduction of a cutoff in the fermion phase-space distribution, necessary to account for the finite Galaxy size, defines a new solution with a central core which represents an alternative to t…
It is increasingly apparent that common merger events play a large role in the evolution of disk galaxies at all cosmic times, from the wet accretion of gas-filled dwarf galaxies during the era of peak star formation, to the collisions between large, dynamically-advanced spiral galaxies and their dry companion satellites, a type of interaction that continues to influence disk structure into the present day. We also live in a large spiral galaxy currently undergoing a series of impacts from an infalling, disrupting dwarf galaxy. As next-generation astrometry proposes to place our understanding …
Galaxy rotation curves determined observationally out to a radius well beyond the galaxy cores can provide a critical test of modified gravity models without dark matter. The predicted rotational velocity curve obtained from Scalar-Vector-Tensor Gravity (STVG or MOG) is in excellent agreement with data for the Milky Way without a dark matter halo, with a mass of $5\times 10^{10}\,M_{\odot}$. The velocity rotation curve predicted by modified Newtonian Dynamics (MOND) does not agree with the data.
We employ an improved methodology to insert live stellar disks into high-resolution dark matter simulations of Milky Way sized halos, allowing us to investigate the fate of thin stellar disks in the tumultuous environment of cold dark matter structures. We study a set of eight different halos, drawn from the Aquarius simulation project, in which stellar disks are adiabatically grown with a prescribed structure, and then allowed to self-consistently evolve. The initial velocity distribution is set-up in very good equilibrium with the help of the GALIC code. We find that the residual triaxiality…
We employ Gaia DR2 proper motions for 151 Milky Way globular clusters from Vasiliev (2019) in tandem with distances and line-of-sight velocities to derive their kinematical properties. To assign clusters to the Milky Way thick disk, bulge, and halo we follow the approach of Posti et al. (2018) who distinguished among different Galactic stellar components using stars's orbits. In particular, we use the ratio $L_{z}/e$, the $Z$ projection of the angular momentum to the eccentricity, as population tracer, which we complement with chemical abundances extracted from the literature and Monte-Carlo s…
We analyze self-consistent N-body simulations of the Milky Way disk and the ongoing disruption of the Sagittarius dwarf satellite to study the effect of Sagittarius tidal debris on dark matter detection experiments. In agreement with significant previous work, we reiterate that the standard halo model is insufficient to describe the non-Maxwellian velocity distribution of the Milky Way halo in our equilibrium halo-only and halo/galaxy models, and offer suggestions for correcting for this discrepancy. More importantly, we emphasize that the dark matter component of the leading tidal arm of the …
We study the effects of inelastic dark matter self-interactions on the internal structure of a simulated Milky Way (MW)-size halo. Self-interacting dark matter (SIDM) is an alternative to collisionless cold dark matter (CDM) which offers a unique solution to the problems encountered with CDM on sub-galactic scales. Although previous SIDM simulations have mainly considered elastic collisions, theoretical considerations motivate the existence of multi-state dark matter where transitions from the excited to the ground state are exothermic. In this work, we consider a self-interacting, two-state d…
We construct the rotation curve of the Milky Way in the extended solar neighbourhood using a sample of SEGUE (Sloan Extension for Galactic Understanding and Exploration) G-dwarfs. We investigate the rotation curve shape for the presence of any peculiarities just outside the solar radius as has been reported by some authors. We approach the problem in a framework of classical Jeans analysis. Using the most recent data from RAVE (RAdial Velocity Experiment), we determine the solar peculiar velocity and the radial scalelengths for the three populations of different metallicities representing the …
We study evolution of self-interacting dark matter (SIDM) subhalos in the Milky Way (MW) tidal field. The interaction between the subhalos and the MW's tides lead to more diverse dark matter distribution in the inner region, compared to their cold dark matter counterparts. We test this scenario with two MW satellite galaxies, Draco and Fornax, opposite extremes in the inner dark matter content, and find that they can be accommodated within the SIDM model proposed to explain the diverse rotation curves of spiral galaxies in the field.
We analyze the existing rotation-curve data of the Milky Way and M31 galaxies that extends to very large distances and low accelerations. We find a systematic downward trend in the weak acceleration (large distances) segment of the radial acceleration. A similar downward trend has been noticed in the $Λ$CDM EAGLE simulation, while the deviation from the generic MOND prediction would need to be ascribed to an external field effect, or possibly a post facto selected acceleration function $μ(x)$.
The observed population of the Milky Way satellite galaxies offer a unique testing ground for galaxy formation theory on small-scales. Our novel approach was to investigate the clustering of the known Milky Way satellite galaxies and to quantify the amount of substructure within their distribution using a two-point correlation function statistic in each of three spaces: configuration space, line-of-sight velocity space, and four-dimensional phase-space. These results were compared to those for three sets of subhaloes in the Via Lactea II Cold Dark Matter simulation defined to represent the lum…
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 …
