Oct 31, 2012

Carlos Vera-Ciro, University of Groeningen, Netherlands

"The New Missing Satellite Problem"

It has been recently argued that the dark matter satellites predicted by LCDM are persistently too dense and massive to host the observed population of dwarf spheroidal galaxies in the Milky Way. I will show that these two issues can be consistently explained if the density profiles followed by the dark subhalos and the mass of the Milky way are reconsidered. Our analysis shows that, contrary to what is commonly assumed, the mass profiles of subhalos are not well fit by NFW models. Also, to explain the internal dynamics of these systems as well as the number of objects of a given circular velocity the total mass of the Milky Way should be ~8 x 10^11Msun.