Nov 16 – 21, 2025
Tsung-Dao Lee Institute
Asia/Shanghai timezone

The dark matter content of Milky Way dwarf spheroidal galaxies: Draco, Sextans and Ursa Minor

Nov 19, 2025, 10:20 AM
15m
Tsung-Dao Lee Institute

Tsung-Dao Lee Institute

1 Lisuo Road, Pudong New Area, Shanghai, 201210
Talk Galaxy Formation and Evolution Galaxies 3

Speaker

Hao Yang (上海交通大学)

Description

The Milky Way Survey of the Dark Energy Spectroscopic Instrument (DESI) has so far observed three classical dwarf spheroidal galaxies (dSphs): Draco, Sextans and Ursa Minor. Based on the observed line-of-sight velocities and metallicities of their member stars, we apply the axisymmetric Jeans Anisotropic Multi-Gaussian Expansion modeling (JAM) approach to recover their inner dark matter distributions. In particular, both the traditional single-population Jeans model and the multiple population chemodynamical model are adopted. With the chemodynamical model, we divide member stars of each dSph into metal-rich and metal-poor populations. The metal-rich populations are more centrally concentrated and dynamically colder, featuring lower velocity dispersion profiles than the metal-poor populations. We find a diversity of the inner density slopes $\gamma$ of dark matter halos, with the best constraints by single-population or chemodynamical models consistent with each other. The inner density slopes are $0.71^{+0.34}_{-0.35}$, $0.26^{+0.22}_{-0.12}$ and $0.33^{+0.20}_{-0.16}$ for Draco, Sextans and Ursa Minor, respectively. We also present the measured astrophysical J and D factors of the three dSphs. Our results indicate that the study of the dark matter content of dSphs through stellar kinematics is still subject to uncertainties behind both the methodology and the observed data, through comparisons with previous measurements and data sets.

Primary authors

Hao Yang (上海交通大学) Wenting Wang

Co-authors

Ling Zhu (Shanghai Astronomical observatory) Ting Li Sergey Koposov Jiaxin Han (Shanghai Jiao Tong University) Songting Li Rui Shi Monica Valluri Alexander Riley Arjun Dey Constance Rockosi Carles Palau

Presentation materials

There are no materials yet.