Empirical Determination of Dark Matter Velocities Using Metal-Poor Stars.

The Milky Way dark matter halo is formed from the accretion of smaller subhalos. These sub-units also harbor stars-typically old and metal-poor-that are deposited in the Galactic inner regions by disruption events. In this Letter, we show that the dark matter and metal-poor stars in the Solar neighborhood share similar kinematics due to their common origin.

A cosmic web filament revealed in Lyman-α emission around a luminous high-redshift quasar.

Simulations of structure formation in the Universe predict that galaxies are embedded in a 'cosmic web', where most baryons reside as rarefied and highly ionized gas. This material has been studied for decades in absorption against background sources, but the sparseness of these inherently one-dimensional probes preclude direct constraints on the three-dimensional morphology of the underlying web. Here we report observations of a cosmic web filament in Lyman-α emission, discovered during a survey for cosmic gas fluorescently illuminated by bright quasars at redshift z ≈ 2.

Exploring dark matter with Milky Way substructure.

The unambiguous detection of dark matter annihilation in our Galaxy would unravel one of the most outstanding puzzles in particle physics and cosmology. Recent observations have motivated models in which the annihilation rate is boosted by the Sommerfeld effect, a nonperturbative enhancement arising from a long-range attractive force. We applied the Sommerfeld correction to Via Lactea II, a high-resolution N-body simulation of a Milky Way-sized galaxy, to investigate the phase-space structure of the galactic halo.