Dark Matter in Astrophysics/Cosmology

Understand

These lecture notes aim to provide an introduction to dark matter from the perspective of astrophysics/cosmology.

• We start with a rapid overview of cosmology, including the evolution of the Universe, its thermal history and structure formation.
• Then we look at the observational evidence for dark matter, from observations of galaxies, galaxy clusters, the anisotropies in the cosmic microwave background radiation and large scale structure.
• To detect dark matter we need to know how it's distributed, in particular in the Milky Way, so next we overview relevant results from numerical simulations and observations.