Dark matter annihilation and decay in dwarf spheroidal galaxies: The classical and ultrafaint dSphs

Understand

Dwarf spheroidal (dSph) galaxies are prime targets for present and future gamma-ray telescopes hunting for indirect signals of particle dark matter.

• The interpretation of the data requires careful assessment of their dark matter content in order to derive robust constraints on candidate relic particles.
• Here, we use an optimised spherical Jeans analysis to reconstruct the `astrophysical factor' for both annihilating and decaying dark matter in 21 known dSphs.
• Improvements with respect to previous works are: (i) the use of more flexible luminosity and anisotropy profiles to minimise biases, (ii) the use of weak priors tailored on extensive sets of contamination-free mock data to improve the confidence intervals, (iii) systematic cross-checks of binned and unbinned analyses on mock and real data, and (iv) the use of mock data including stellar contamination to test the impact on reconstructed signals.