Joint Astrophysics Colloquium

Joint Astrophysics Seminar

Dark Matter Substructures and Centers of Elliptical Galaxies

Chung-Pei Ma

UC Berkeley

Much recent discussion about dark matter has been centered on two seemingly independent problems: the abundance of substructure in dark matter halos, and the cuspiness of the halos' inner density profile. I will discuss how these two properties of dark matter may be linked dynamically via a cosmological kinetic theory, and how the dynamics of substructures and satellite galaxies is also relevant for the core-cusp dichotomy of the central properties of elliptical galaxies harboring supermassive black holes.