Measuring the boson mass of fuzzy dark matter with stellar proper motions

Understand

Fuzzy Dark Matter (FDM) is among the most suitable candidates to replace WIMPs and to resolve the puzzling mystery of dark matter.

• A galactic dark matter halo made of these ultralight bosonic particles leads to the formation of a solitonic core surrounded by quantum interference patterns that, on average, reproduce a Navarro-Frenk-White-like mass density profile in the outskirts of the halo.
• The structure of such a core is determined once the boson mass and the total mass of the halo are set.
• We investigated the capability of future astrometric Theia-like missions to detect the properties of such a halo within the FDM model, namely the boson mass and the core radius.