How Spherical Is The Invisible Cow? (Measuring the Shapes of
Dark Matter Halos)
Jeremy Bailin
McMaster
October 8, 2007, 4PM, Steward N210
Cosmological simulations predict that the dark matter halos in which
galaxies form are not spherical, but can be quite flattened and are
often triaxial. This is not true of the inferred dark matter
distribution in alternative gravity theories, providing an excellent
discriminator between these possibilities. I propose several methods to
measure the shapes of galactic dark matter halos, focusing on the
locations and kinematics of satellite galaxies, and on two-dimensional
velocity fields of low surface brightness galaxies.
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