Joy Bhattacharyya

The way the stellar mass of a galaxy depends on its halo mass is not well constrained, particularly for low mass galaxies. This is because there are significant tensions that exist between measurements and the standard dark matter predictions concerning the densities of the hearts of halos. Exotic schemes of dark matter has been proposed including self-interacting dark matter, where the dark matter particle can scatter off each other. This results in among things reduced densities at the center of the halos as well as increased disruption of satellites galaxies. Such signatures can be detected using methods like weak gravitational lensing that lets us directly probe the dark matter distribution of distant galaxies. In the work \citet{2022ApJ...932...30B}, I compared simulations of galaxy clusters in both the standard and self-interacting modes to study the dark matter distribution of the satellites contained in the cluster. I found that the viability of the self-interacting model could be tested using weak lensing with observations in the future. Establishing the nature of dark matter, will be a crucial component in constraining the galaxy-halo connection.