Galactic Anomalies and Particle Dark Matter

This is a brief review of aspects of galactic astrophysics and astronomy which have a possible bearing on particle dark matter. It is still quite normal for particle physicists to try to solve “well known anomalies“ that are apparently seen in observations of galaxies (missing satellites, cusp vs. core, etc.) whereas a lot of these anomalies have actually been resolved many years ago. We will try to briefly review the field and discuss many of the areas in question.

Spurious Point Source Signals in the Galactic Center Excess

We reexamine evidence that the Galactic Center Excess (GCE) originates primarily from point sources (PSs). We show that in our region of interest, non-Poissonian template fitting evidence for GCE PSs is an artifact of unmodeled north-south asymmetry of the GCE. This asymmetry is strongly favored by the fit (although it is unclear if this is physical), and when it is allowed, the preference for PSs becomes insignificant. We reproduce this behavior in simulations, including detailed properties of the spurious PS population. We conclude that the non-Poissonian template fitting evidence for GCE PSs is highly susceptible to certain systematic errors and should not at present be taken to robustly disfavor a dominantly smooth GCE.

Remnants of Galactic Subhalos and Their Impact on Indirect Dark-Matter Searches

Dark-matter subhalos, predicted in large numbers in the cold-dark-matter scenario, should have an impact on dark-matter-particle searches. Recent results show that tidal disruption of these objects in computer simulations is overefficient due to numerical artifacts and resolution effects. Accounting for these results, we re-estimated the subhalo abundance in the Milky Way using semianalytical techniques. In particular, we showed that the boost factor for gamma rays and cosmic-ray antiprotons is increased by roughly a factor of two.