Tilmann PIFFL
Oxford University
There is over-whelming evidence for the presence of a dark matter halos around external galaxies and galaxy clusters. For our own Galaxy the situation is less clear, even though the Milky Way can be studied to much greater detail. In this talk I present a new analysis approach that combines a number of kinematic and photometric observations and extracts their implications on the local and global structure of the stellar disc and the dark halo. Most important data set is a sample of almost 200 000 stars from the RAVE survey for which we have knowledge about all six phase space coordinates. To properly exploit this information we have to invoke a full dynamical model of the stellar disc – a step that was often omitted in the past. Our approach leads to extremely tight constraints on the local density of dark matter and the vertical mass profile in the solar annulus. I will discuss these results and also mention some next steps that we attempt to do in the near future.