Prospects for Detecting Dark Matter Halo Substructure with Pulsar Timing

Understand

One of the open questions of modern cosmology is the nature and properties of the Dark Matter halo and its substructures.

• In this work we study the gravitational effect of dark matter substructures on pulsar timing observations.
• Since millisecond pulsars are stable and accurate emitters, they have been proposed as plausible astrophysical tools to probe the gravitational effects of dark matter structures.
• We study this effect on pulsar timing through Shapiro time delay (or Integrated Sachs-Wolfe (ISW) effect) and Doppler effects statistically, showing that the latter dominates the signal.