Dark Matter Heats Up in Dwarf Galaxies

In this talk, astrophysicist Justin Read will show how repeated gas cooling and heating during star formation causes the gravitational potential at the centers of dwarf galaxies to continually fluctuate. This kinematically ‘heats’ the dark matter, slowly pushing it out from the centers of the dwarfs. He will present the first observational evidence for this process occurring in a sample of 18 nearby dwarf galaxies and will show how this solves both the cusp-core and missing satellites problems. He will conclude with a discussion of the broader implications of these results and how these dwarfs can now be used to place competitive constraints on alternative dark matter models.