No Arabic abstract
Low Surface Brightness (LSB) galaxies have very diffuse, low surface density stellar disks which appear faint in optical images. They are very rich in neutral hydrogen (HI) gas, which extends well beyond the stellar disks. Their extended HI rotation curves and stellar disks indicate that they have very massive dark matter (DM) halos compared to normal bright galaxies. Hence, LSB galaxies may represent valuable laboratories for the indirect detection of DM. In this paper, we search for WIMP annihilation signatures in four LSB galaxies and present an analysis of nearly nine years of data from the Fermi Large Area Telescope (LAT). Above 500 MeV, no excess emission was detected from the LSB galaxies. We obtain constraints on the DM cross-section for different annihilation channels, for both individual and stacked targets. In addition to this, we use radio data from the Very Large Array (VLA) radio telescope in order to derive DM constraints, following a multiwavelength approach. The constraints obtained from the four considered LSB galaxies are nearly 3 orders of magnitude weaker than the predicted limits for the thermal relic abundances and the combined limits achieved from Fermi-LAT observations of dwarf spheroidal galaxies. Finally, we discuss the possibility of detecting emission from LSB galaxies using the upcoming ground-based $gamma$-ray and radio observatories, namely the Cherenkov Telescope Array (CTA) and the Square Kilometre Array (SKA).
The observed rotation curves of low surface brightness (LSB) galaxies play an essential role in studying dark matter, and indicate that there exists a central constant density dark matter core. However, the cosmological N-body simulations of cold dark matter predict an inner cusped halo with a power-law mass density distribution, and cant reproduce a central constant-density core. This phenomenon is called cusp-core problem. When dark matter is quiescent and satisfies the condition for hydrostatic equilibrium, using the equation of state can get the density profile in the static and spherically symmetric space-time. To solve the cusp-core problem, we assume that the equation of state is independent of the scaling transformation. Its lower order approximation for this type of equation of state can naturally lead to a special case, i.e. $p=zetarho+2epsilon V_{rot}^{2}rho$, where $p$ and $rho$ are the pressure and density, $V_{rot}$ is the rotation velocity of galaxy, $zeta$ and $ epsilon$ are positive constants. It can obtain a density profile that is similar to the pseudo-isothermal halo model when $epsilon$ is around $0.15$. To get a more widely used model, let the equation of state include the polytropic model, i.e. $p= frac{zeta}{rho_{0}^{s}}rho^{1+s}+ 2epsilon V_{rot}^{2}rho$, we can get other kinds of density profiles, such as the profile that is nearly same with the Burkert profile, where $s$ and $rho_{0}$ are positive constants.
We study the ages of a large sample (1,802) of nearly face-on disk low surface brightness galaxies (LSBGs) by using the evolutionary population synthesis (EPS) model PEGASE with exponential decreasing star formation rate to fit their multiwavelength spectral energy distributions (SEDs) from far-ultraviolet (FUV) to near-infrared (NIR). The derived ages of LSBGs are 1-5 Gyr for most of the sample no matter the constant or varying dust extinction is adopted, which are similar to most of the previous studies on smaller samples. This means that these LSBGs formed their majority of stars quite recently. However, a small part of the sample (~2-3%) have larger ages as 5-8 Gyr, meaning their major star forming process may occur earlier. At the same time, a large sample (5,886) of high surface brightness galaxies (HSBGs) are selected and studied in the same method for comparisons. The derived ages are 1-5 Gyr for most of the sample (97%) as well. These may mean that probably these LSBGs have no much different star formation history from their HSBGs counterparts. But we should notice that the HSBGs are about 0.2 Gyr younger generally, which could mean that the HSBGs may have more recent star forming activities than the LSBGs.
Recent advancements in the imaging of low-surface-brightness objects revealed numerous ultra-diffuse galaxies in the local Universe. These peculiar objects are unusually extended and faint: their effective radii are comparable to the Milky Way, but their surface brightnesses are lower than that of dwarf galaxies. Their ambiguous properties motivate two potential formation scenarios: the failed Milky Way and the dwarf galaxy scenario. In this paper, for the first time, we employ X-ray observations to test these formation scenarios on a sample of isolated, low-surface-brightness galaxies. Since hot gas X-ray luminosities correlate with the dark matter halo mass, failed Milky Way-type galaxies, which reside in massive dark matter halos, are expected to have significantly higher X-ray luminosities than dwarf galaxies, which reside in low-mass dark matter halos. We perform X-ray photometry on a subset of low-surface-brightness galaxies identified in the Hyper Suprime-Cam Subaru survey, utilizing the XMM-Newton XXL North survey. We find that none of the individual galaxies show significant X-ray emission. By co-adding the signal of individual galaxies, the stacked galaxies remain undetected and we set an X-ray luminosity upper limit of ${L_{rm{0.3-1.2keV}}leq6.2 times 10^{37} (d/65 rm{Mpc})^2 rm{erg s^{-1}}}$ for an average isolated low-surface-brightness galaxy. This upper limit is about 40 times lower than that expected in a galaxy with a massive dark matter halo, implying that the majority of isolated low-surface-brightness galaxies reside in dwarf-size dark matter halos.
Searches for dark matter annihilation signals have been carried out in a number of target regions such as the Galactic Center and Milky Way dwarf spheroidal galaxies (dSphs), among a few others. Here we propose low surface brightness galaxies (LSBGs) asnovel targets for the indirect detection of dark matter emission. In particular, LSBGs are known to have very large dark matter contents and be less contaminated by extragalactic gamma-ray sources (e.g., blazars) compared to star forming galaxies. We report on an analysis that uses eight LSBGs (detected by Subaru Hyper Suprime-Cam survey data) with known redshifts to conduct a search for gamma-ray emission at the positions of these new objects in Fermi Large Area Telescope data. We found no excesses of gamma-ray emission and set constraints on the dark matter annihilation cross-section. We exclude (at the 95% C.L.) dark matter scenarios predicting a cross-section higher than 10^-23[cm^3/s] for dark matter particles of mass 10 GeV self-annihilating in the b_b channel. Although this constraint is weaker than the ones reported in recent studies using other targets, we note that in the near future, the number of detections of new LSBGs will increase by a few orders of magnitude. We forecast that with the use of the full catalog of soon-to-be-detected LSBGs the constraint will reach cross-section sensitivities of ~ 3*10^-25 [cm^3/s] for dark matter particles with masses less than 10 GeV.
Galaxies are the basic structural element of the universe; galaxy formation theory seeks to explain how these structures came to be. I trace some of the foundational ideas in galaxy formation, with emphasis on the need for non-baryonic cold dark matter. Many elements of early theory did not survive contact with observations of low surface brightness galaxies, leading to the need for auxiliary hypotheses like feedback. The failure points often trace to the surprising predictive successes of an alternative to dark matter, the Modified Newtonian Dynamics (MOND). While dark matter models are flexible in accommodating observations, they do not provide the predictive capacity of MOND. If the universe is made of cold dark matter, why does MOND get any predictions right?