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The New ESA F-Class Mission to Investigate the Nature of Dark Matter

Rafael Guzmán
Instituto de Física de Cantabria

Abstract
The "Analysis of Resolved Remnants of Accreted galaxies as a Key Instrument for Halo Surveys" (ARRAKIHS) mission will explore the ultra-low surface brightness universe to investigate the nature of Dark Matter. ARRAKIHS was selected in November 2022 as the next F-class mission at ESA for Phases 0/A/B, with an estimated launch date in 2030.
The ARRAKIHS science consortium, led by IFCA (Spain) in partnership with several European research centers and space companies, is collaborating with ESA to launch an array of visible and infrared cameras on board a mini-satellite in Low Earth Orbit. The goal of ARRAKIHS is to test the predictions of different Dark Matter models and baryon physics mechanisms on the halo structure as well as on the statistics of halo satellites and stellar streams for a representative sample of MW-type galaxies in the nearby Universe. In this talk, I will provide a progress report on the ARRAKIHS mission after successfully passing Phase 0/A and we continue working on Phase B that will end in early 2026 with the mission adoption. The spectral energy distribution (SED) of the tidal features were measured both in manually drawn polygons and an automatic tessellation over the fully detected region of the tidal features and galaxy. To validate J-PAS, a MaNGA data cube, observed in the central region of the galaxy, is used. J-PAS reaches a continuum 3σ surface brightness limit (over 100 arcsec2 at 7000Å) of 26.57 mag/arcsec2 or 5.2 × 10 −20 erg/s/cm2 /Å/arcsec2.

2024 December 11, 13:30

IA/U.Porto
Centro de Astrofísica da Universidade do Porto (Auditorium)
Rua das Estrelas, 4150-762 Porto

Faculdade de Ciências da Universidade de Lisboa Universidade do Porto Faculdade de Ciências e Tecnologia da Universidade de Coimbra
Fundação para a Ciência e a Tecnologia COMPETE 2020 PORTUGAL 2020 União Europeia