Dark Matter Inferences from Rotation Curve Fitting

Abstract
Rotation curves of disk galaxies are often used to probe the 
gravitational potential of their hosting dark matter (DM) haloes. Combining 
kinematic and photometric data several authors argue that the density prole of 
galactic halos is nearly 
at in the central region (inner / r0). This fact is 
in contradiction with the steep prole expected from cosmological cold 
dark matter simulations (inner / r􀀀1), challenging both observers and 
theoreticians (so called the core/cusp problem). It is worth nothing however 
that inherent uncertainties exist in both approaches, preventing a denite 
verdict on this problem thus far.
In this work we attempt to bring the analysis of observations and cosmological 
simulations closer together. For this we apply the full observers'pipeline on a 
large set of mock data from simulated disk galaxies that were chosen to 
reproduce several realistic features. Our mock catalog includes SDSS multiband 
photometry created with the radiative transfer code SUNRISE plus HI intensity 
and velocity maps similar to those of the THINGS survey. Then we create surface 
brightness proles, rotation curves, and rotation curves for the baryonic 
components in order to disentangle the pure halo contribution to the kinematics 
and use it to infere its density prole. The results are then compared to the 
real density proles as directly measured from the snapshots and the agreement 
is quantied in terms of several critical parameters such as inclination or the 
amount of non-axysimmetric features in the light/velocity distributions. Our 
approach thus provides an accurate assessment of potential systematic 
uncertainties in the interpretation of the observational data.