Non-sphericity of ultra-light axion dark matter halos in the Galactic dwarf spheroidal galaxies

Abstract

Ultralight-axion (ULA) dark matter is one of the possible solutions to resolve small-scale problems, especially the core-cusp problem. This is because ULA dark matter can create a central soliton core in all dark matter haloes stemmed from the quantum pressure against gravity below the de Broglie wavelength, which becomes manifest on astrophysical scales with axion mass range $\\sim10^{-22}$ eV. In this work, we apply our non-spherical dynamical models to the kinematic data of eight classical dwarf spheroidals (dSphs) to obtain more reliable and realistic limits on ULA particle mass. This is motivated by the reasons that the light distributions of the dSphs are not spherical, nor are the shapes of dark matter haloes predicted by ULA dark matter simulations. Compared with the previous studies on ULA dark matter assuming spherical mass models, our result is less stringent than those constraints due to the uncertainties on non-sphericity. On the other hand, remarkably, we find that the dSphs would prefer to have a flattened dark matter halo rather than a spherical one, especially Draco favours a strongly elongated dark matter halo caused naively by the assumption of a soliton-core profile. Moreover, our consequent non-spherical core profiles are much more flattened than numerical predictions based on ULA dark matter, even though there are still uncertainties on the estimation of dark matter halo structure. To alleviate this discrepancy, further understanding of baryonic and/or ULA dark matter physics on small mass scales might be needed.