dwarf galaxies

The dwarf spheroidal satellite galaxies of the Milky Way are some of the most dark matter dominated regions of our Galaxy. One natural consequence of some dark matter models is self-annihilation leading to the possibility of observing gamma-ray signals from regions of high dark-matter density. To infer the nature of the dark matter particle from gamma-ray observations, we require knowledge of the quantity and distribution of dark matter in the dwarf spheroidal galaxies.

We have developed methods for robustly inferring the mass of dark matter within flattened galaxies. We have demonstrated how one can simply compute the expected dark-matter annihilation signal and how this can be adjusted to account for the effects of flattening, which gives rise to a small change in the expected hierarchy of annihilation signals from the dwarf galaxies.