Gravitational Lensing as a Probe of Cold Dark Matter Subhalos.pdfVIP

Hindawi Publishing Corporation Advances in Astronomy Volume 2010, Article ID 478910, 14 pages doi:10.1155/2010/478910 Review Article Gravitational Lensing as a Probe of Cold Dark Matter Subhalos Erik Zackrisson and Teresa Riehm Department of Astronomy, Oskar Klein Centre for Cosmoparticle Physics, Stockholm University, 10691 Stockholm, Sweden Correspondence should be addressed to Erik Zackrisson, ez@astro.su.se Received 30 April 2009; Accepted 10 September 2009 Academic Editor: Regina Schulte-Ladbeck Copyright © 2010 E. Zackrisson and T. Riehm. This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. In the cold dark matter scenario, dark matter halos are assembled hierarchically from smaller subunits. Some of these subunits are disrupted during the merging process, whereas others survive temporarily in the form of subhalos. A long-standing problem with this picture is that the number of subhalos predicted by simulations exceeds the number of luminous dwarf galaxies seen in the vicinity of large galaxies like the Milky Way. Many of the subhalos must therefore have remained dark or very faint. If cold dark matter subhalos are as common as predicted, gravitational lensing may in principle offer a promising route to detection. In this paper, we describe the many ways through which lensing by subhalos can manifest itself, and summarize the results from current efforts to constrain the properties of cold dark matter subhalos using such effects. 1. Introduction: Subhalos and temporarily survive in the form of subhalos (also known Satellite Galaxies