Bringing the Galaxy's dark halo to life

Understand

We present a new method to construct fully self-consistent equilibrium models of multi-component disc galaxies similar to the Milky Way.

• We define distribution functions for the stellar disc and dark halo that depend on phase space position only through action coordinates.
• We then use an iterative approach to find the corresponding gravitational potential.
• We study the adiabatic response of the initially spherical dark halo to the introduction of the baryonic component and find that the halo flattens in its inner regions with final minor-major axis ratios $q$ = 0.75 - 0.95.