Which galaxies have the best studied evidence for dark matter?

[timjdoom]

Unsurprisingly the Milky Way seems to have been studied a lot. We have really good luminous mass profiles (e.g. McMillan 2011) and increasingly accurate circular velocity observations for stars at various radiuses (e.g. Eilers 2019) meaning we can confidently infer dark matter models.

So the question is which other galaxies have been heavily studied to give reasonably accurate dark matter estimates?

 

[ohwilleke]

I would argue that this is a matter where quantity matters as much as individual example quality, and one of the better ones on that score is (paragraph breaks in abstract added editorially for ease of reading):

We present rotation curve fits to 175 late-type galaxies from the Spitzer Photometry & Accurate Rotation Curves (SPARC) database using seven dark matter (DM) halo profiles: pseudo-isothermal (pISO), Burkert, Navarro-Frenk-White (NFW), Einasto, Di Cintio (2014, DC14), coreNFW, and a new semi-empirical profile named Lucky13. We marginalize over stellar mass-to-light ratio, galaxy distance, disk inclination, halo concentration and halo mass (and an additional shape parameter for Einasto) using a Markov Chain Monte Carlo method.

We find that cored halo models such as the DC14 and Burkert profiles generally provide better fits to rotation curves than the cuspy NFW profile.

The stellar mass-halo mass relation from abundance matching is recovered by all halo profiles once imposed as a Bayesian prior, whereas the halo mass-concentration relation is not reproduced in detail by any halo model. We provide an extensive set of figures as well as best-fit parameters in machine-readable tables to facilitate model comparison and the exploration of DM halo properties.

Pengfei Li, et al., "A comprehensive catalog of dark matter halo models for SPARC galaxies" https://arxiv.org/abs/2001.10538 (January 30, 2020) (Accepted for publication in ApJS).

The problem is that essentially all astronomy observations have significant data point specific uncertainties (astronomers measure error in "dex" which means ± (best fit value*10^dex), since they are used to big error bars), so only with a decent statistical sample can you make a reasonable evaluation of what is really out there.

 

[kimbyd]

I get the impression you think these observations are more precise than they are. One major problem is that we can only accurately measure line-of-sight velocities. This means that in order to translate from observations to some model of dark matter, you need to introduce a model that relates the 3D velocity vectors to those line-of-sight velocities. And getting that model wrong can bias the results significantly.

This is why even for the Milky Way, the errors on its mass are around 25%.

Which all adds up to what ohwilleke said: the best data comes from large-scale surveys.

 

[ohwilleke]

This isn't a particularly scientific and systemic summary, but there is a lot of literature on the subject and here are some examples. The individual galaxies or clusters that are the subject of the most scholarship are not the most precisely measured ones in many cases, but some specific notable instances are:

1. The Milky Way. M. Crosta, M. Giammaria, M.G. Lattanzi, E. Poggio, "On testing CDM and geometry-driven Milky Way rotation curve models with Gaia DR2." 496 Mon. Not. R. Astron. Soc. 2107–2122 (2020) (open access) and C. Moni Bidin, G. Carraro, R. A. Méndez and R. Smith, “Kinematical and chemical vertical structure of the Galactic thick disk II. A lack of dark matter in the solar neighborhood", The Astrophysical Journal (upcoming).

2. Niikura, H.; Takada, M.; Yasuda, N.; et al. (2019). "Microlensing constraints on primordial black holes with Subaru/HSC Andromeda observations". Nature Astronomy. 3 (6): 524–534. arXiv:1701.02151. doi:10.1038/s41550-019-0723-1.

3. Ultra-diffuse galaxy AGC 114905 See Pavel E. Mancera Piña, et al., "No need for dark matter: resolved kinematics of the ultra-diffuse galaxy AGC 114905" arXiv:2112.00017 (Accepted for publication in MNRAS) and J. A. Sellwood and R. H. Sanders, "The ultra-diffuse galaxy AGC 114905 needs dark matter" arXiv:2202.08678 (February 17, 2022) (submitted to MNRAS) https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2202.08678

4. David A. Buote, Aaron J. Barth, "The Extremely High Dark Matter Halo Concentration of the Relic Compact Elliptical Galaxy Mrk 1216" (8 Feb 2019)

5. Two galaxies in the NGC1052 group.

Pieter van Dokkum, et al., "A second galaxy missing dark matter in the NGC1052 group" (17 Jan 2019) and Pieter van Dokkum, et al., "A galaxy lacking dark matter", arXiv (March 27, 2018) and Pieter van Dokkum, et al., "An enigmatic population of luminous globular clusters in a galaxy lacking dark matter" (March 27, 2018).

6. The Coma Cluster.

The Coma Cluster (Abell 1656) is a large cluster of galaxies that contains over 1,000 identified galaxies. Along with the Leo Cluster (Abell 1367), it is one of the two major clusters comprising the Coma Supercluster. . . . The Coma Cluster is one of the first places where observed gravitational anomalies were considered to be indicative of unobserved mass. In 1933 Fritz Zwicky showed that the galaxies of the Coma Cluster were moving too fast for the cluster to be bound together by the visible matter of its galaxies. Though the idea of dark matter would not be accepted for another fifty years, Zwicky wrote that the galaxies must be held together by "...some dunkle Materie."

(Source) (incidentally, this quote is probably the oblique reference being made by author Phillip Pullman in the name of his most famous faction series).

7. Strong gravitational lens ESO 325-G004

Thomas E. Collett, et al., "A precise extragalactic test of General Relativity." 360 (6395) Science 1342-1346 (2018) DOI: 10.1126/science.aao2469 (pay per view). Preprint available here.

8.. Crater II

Stacy S. McGaugh, "MOND Prediction for the Velocity Dispersion of the `Feeble Giant' Crater II" (November 3, 2016) and Nelson Caldwell, "Crater 2: An Extremely Cold Dark Matter Halo" arXiv:1612.06398 (December 19, 2016).

9. Strong gravitational lens RXJ1131-1231

Simon Birrer, Adam Amara, and Alexandre Refregier, "Lensing substructure quantification in RXJ1131-1231: A 2 keV lower bound on dark matter thermal relict mass" (January 31, 2017).

10. The El Gordo Cluster.

Sandor M. Molnar, Tom Broadhurst. "A HYDRODYNAMICAL SOLUTION FOR THE “TWIN-TAILED” COLLIDING GALAXY CLUSTER “EL GORDO”. The Astrophysical Journal, 2015; 800 (1): 37 DOI: 10.1088/0004-637X/800/1/37

Other notable surveys:

Pavel E. Mancera Piña, et al., "A tight angular-momentum plane for disc galaxies" arXiv 2107:02809 (July 6, 2021) (accepted for publication in A&A Letters)

Margot M. Brouwer, et al., "The Weak Lensing Radial Acceleration Relation: Constraining Modified Gravity and Cold Dark Matter theories with KiDS-1000" (June 22, 2021) (650 Astronomy & Astrophysics A113 (2021)
DOI: 10.1051/0004-6361/202040108)

Lorenzo Posti, S. Michael Fall "Dynamical evidence for a morphology-dependent relation between the stellar and halo masses of galaxies" Accepted for publication in A&A. arXiv:2102.11282 (February 22, 2021)

Massimo Meneghetti, et al., "An excess of small-scale gravitational lenses observed in galaxy clusters" 369 (6509) Science 147-1351 (September 11, 2020). DOI: 10.1126/science.aax5164

B. Javanmardi, M. Raouf, H. G. Khosroshahi, S. Tavasoli, O. Müller, A. Molaeinezhad, "The number of dwarf satellites of disk galaxies versus their bulge mass in the standard model of cosmology" (November 21, 2018) (accepted in The Astrophysical Journal)

Paolo Salucci, "The distribution of dark matter in galaxies" (November 21, 2018) (60 pages, 28 Figures ~220 refs. Invited review for The Astronomy and Astrophysics Review)

Marie Korsaga, et al., "GHASP: an Hα kinematics survey of spiral galaxies - XII. Distribution of luminous and dark matter in spiral and irregular nearby galaxies using Rc-band photometry" (September 17, 2018)

Lin Wang, Da-Ming Chen, Ran Li "The total density profile of DM halos fitted from strong lensing" (July 31, 2017).

Edo van Uitert, et al., "Halo ellipticity of GAMA galaxy groups from KiDS weak lensing" (October 13, 2016).

L.V. Sales, et al., "The low-mass end of the baryonic Tully-Fisher relation" (February 5, 2016).

Antonino Del Popolo et al., "Correlations between the Dark Matter and Baryonic Properties of CLASH Galaxy Clusters" (August 6, 2018).

Pengfei Li, et al., "Fitting the Radial Acceleration Relation to Individual SPARC Galaxies" arXiv (February 28, 2018).

Stacy McGaugh, et al., "The Baryonic Tully-Fisher Relation in the Local Group and the Equivalent Circular Velocity of Pressure Supported Dwarfs" arXiv:2109.03251 (September 7, 2021) (Accepted for publication in the Astronomical Journal)

Anastasia A. Ponomareva, et al. "MIGHTEE-HI: The baryonic Tully-Fisher relation over the last billion years" arXiv:2109.04992 (September 10, 2021) (accepted for publication in MNRAS).

Hengxing Pan, et al., "Measuring the baryonic Tully-Fisher relation below the detection threshold" arXiv:2109.04273 (September 9, 2021) (Accepted for publication in MNRAS).

Another quite notable paper on the subject you are interested in, which is the source of "Renzo's Rule" (i.e. “For any feature in the luminosity profile there is a corresponding feature in the rotation curve and vice versa.”) is: Sancisi, R. "The visible matter – dark matter coupling." Dark Matter in Galaxies; Ryder, S.; Pisano, D.; Walker, M.; Freeman, K., Eds., 2004, Vol. 220, IAU Symposium, p. 233, [astro-ph/0311348].

 

[timjdoom]

This is outstanding and insanely helpful. This goes so far above and beyond the detail and thoughtfulness of response I could have hoped for. I can't thank you enough!

SPARC looks to be exactly what I wanted, however the richness in the breadth of other material is what I needed. Thanks again