News on Dark Matter in Galaxies and Clusters

Abstract

Major progresses have been made this last year towards a better knowledge of the invisible mass. Michel Spiro will talk in details about the micro-lensing experiments and their promising results; the ROSAT satellite has provided extended X-ray maps of the hot gas, which traces dark matter in galaxy clusters: they reveal lower amounts of dark matter in clusters than was previously derived; the dark to visible mass in clusters is not larger than its value in spiral galaxies. It was shown, by X-ray data and gravitational lenses analysis that the dark matter density is highly peaked towards the cluster centers. A new dark matter candidate has also been proposed, in the form of cold and fractal molecular gas that could be present around most late-type spiral galaxies and account for the observed flat rotation curves.