Dark Matter at the Center and in the Halo of the Galaxy

Abstract

All presently known stellar-dynamical constraints on the size and mass of the supermassive compact dark object at the Galactic center are consistent with a ball of self-gravitating, nearly non-interacting, degenerate fermions with mass between 76 and 491 keV, for degeneracy factor g=2. Sterile neutrinos of 76 keV mass, which are mixed with at least one of the active neutrinos with a mixing angele ~10^{-7}, are produced in about the right amount in the early Universe by incoherent resonant and non-resonant scattering of active neutrinos having asymmetry of ~0.01. The former process yields sterile neutrinos with a quasi-degenerate spectrum while the latter leads to a thermal spectrum. As the production mechanism of the sterile neutrino is consistent with the constraints from large scale structure formation, core collapse supernovae, and diffuse X-ray background, it could be the dark matter particle of the Universe.