Constraints on sterile neutrino models from strong gravitational lensing, Milky Way satellites, and Lyman-$\alpha$ forest

Understand

The nature of dark matter is one of the most important unsolved questions in science.

• Some dark matter candidates do not have sufficient nongravitational interactions to be probed in laboratory or accelerator experiments.
• It is thus important to develop astrophysical probes which can constrain or lead to a discovery of such candidates.
• We illustrate this using state-of-the-art measurements of strong gravitationally-lensed quasars to constrain four of the most popular sterile neutrino models, and also report the constraints for other independent methods that are comparable in procedure.