Galaxies & their halos - Cosmic laboratories for Dark Matter research

Dark Matter (DM) is ubiquitous and of fundamental importance in Cosmology and Astro-Particle Physics. The realization that our own `visible' Milky Way (MW) galaxy is embedded within a 'dark' halo has been with us for more than half a century. In the last few decades, the same structure has been found for all galaxies, especially, local disk galaxies. Yet,  knowledge of these dark halos is still poor with considerable uncertainty/debate on its size, mass or density structure, etc. Knowledge of the velocity structures of the DM particles is even poorer and has been largely limited to some physically motivated ansatz or extracted out of DM-only simulations. This lack of knowledge impacts our efforts to understand the nature of DM, say its mass, cross-sections, whether they are self-interacting, whether they are fuzzy, etc. The path to this fundamental component of DM research, which impacts detection experiments, is through our understanding of the phase-space of DM which for real galaxies can only be extracted from observations (unlike simulations). 

About a decade back, we started a program to extract the nature of the DM phase space from observational data for the Milky Way and other local galaxies, with an eye toward detection experiments and to confront DM simulations/ansatzes with real data.  In this talk, I will try to walk you through the progress that has been made in the last ten years.