Does the Fornax dwarf spheroidal have a central cusp or core?

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  • 6 February 2006
Abstract
The dark matter dominated Fornax dwarf spheroidal has five globular clusters orbiting at ~1 kpc from its centre. In a cuspy CDM halo the globulars would sink to the centre from their current positions within crucially less than their estimated lifetime. We show that a solution to this timing problem is to adopt a cored dark matter halo. We use numerical simulations and analytic calculations to show that, under these conditions, the sinking time becomes many Hubble times; the globulars effectively stall at the dark matter core radius. We conclude that the Fornax dwarf spheroidal has a shallow inner density profile with a core radius constrained by the observed positions of its globular clusters. If the phase space density of the core is primordial then it implies a warm dark matter particle and gives an upper limit to its mass of 0.5 keV, consistent with that required to significantly alleviate the substructure problem.

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