The central slope of dark matter cores in dwarf galaxies: Simulations vs. THINGS

Understand

We make a direct comparison of the derived dark matter (DM) distributions between hydrodynamical simulations of dwarf galaxies assuming a LCDM cosmology and the observed dwarf galaxies sample from the THINGS survey in terms of (1) the rotation curve shape and (2) the logarithmic inner density slope alpha of mass density profiles.

• The simulations, which include the effect of baryonic feedback processes, such as gas cooling, star formation, cosmic UV background heating and most importantly physically motivated gas outflows driven by supernovae (SNe), form bulgeless galaxies with DM cores.
• We show that the stellar and baryonic mass is similar to that inferred from photometric and kinematic methods for galaxies of similar circular velocity.
• Analyzing the simulations in exactly the same way as the observational sample allows us to address directly the so-called "cusp/core" problem in the LCDM model.