Speaker
Simona Vegetti
Description
The nature of dark matter and how galaxies form in the early Universe are two major issues of modern Cosmology. Observations of the Milky Way satellite galaxies have long been used as test laboratories of the Cold Dark Matter paradigm in the small non-linear regime. These have revealed a number of potential problems that could potentially be solved by baryonic feedback processes and star formation but that may also be the signature of a different physics of the dark matter. As detecting satellite galaxies and measuring their properties can be observationally challenging, most of the observations have been limited to the Local Group, which may not necessarily be a fair representation of the Universe. Strong gravitational lensing allows us to detect low-mass dark matter satellites beyond the Local Universe and provides therefore an excellent tool to study the properties of dark matter while investigating major issues in the field of galaxy formation and evolution.