Evidences against cuspy dark matter halos in large galaxies (1701.02698v2)

Abstract: We develop and apply new techniques in order to uncover galaxy rotation curves (RC) systematics. Considering that an ideal dark matter (DM) profile should yield RCs that have no bias towards any particular radius, we find that the Burkert DM profile satisfies the test, while the Navarro-Frenk-While (NFW) profile has a tendency of better fitting the region between one and two disc scale lengths than the inner disc scale length region. Our sample indicates that this behaviour happens to more than 75% of the galaxies fitted with an NFW halo. Also, this tendency does not weaken by considering "large" galaxies, for instance those with $M_\gtrsim 10^{10} M_\odot$. Besides the tests on the homogeneity of the fits, we also use a sample of 62 galaxies of diverse types to perform tests on the quality of the overall fit of each galaxy, and to search for correlations with stellar mass, gas mass and the disc scale length. In particular, we find that only 13 galaxies are better fitted by the NFW halo; and that even for the galaxies with $M_ \gtrsim 10^{10} M_\odot$ the Burkert profile either fits as good as, or better than, the NFW profile. This result is relevant since different baryonic effects important for the smaller galaxies, like supernova feedback and dynamical friction from baryonic clumps, indicate that at such large stellar masses the NFW profile should be preferred over the Burkert profile. Hence, our results either suggest a new baryonic effect or a change of the dark matter physics.