Seminar
Dark Matter in Spiral Galaxies: dynamical constraints

Abstract

Dark Matter in Galaxies is an important subject of current astrophysical research. I will concentrate on spiral galaxies, and first give an overview of the subject from the standpoint of a radioastronomer with a long involvement in the subject. This includes a historical introduction and a review of some of the present-day debates. The currently popular Lambda-CDM model has problems on the scale of galaxies. In a second part I will address more specifically the problem that we still do not know how much dark matter there is in spiral galaxies, and how it is distributed. This is due to the fact that the M/L of the visible matter is poorly constrained and that there is a 'conspiracy' between the dark and the baryonic material. I will present various dynamical methods that have been proposed to constrain the dark matter mass distribution and discuss their advantages and disadvantages.