Dark matter effect on the weak deflection angle by black holes at the center of Milky Way and M87 galaxies

In this paper, we investigated the effect of dark matter on the weak deflection angle by black holes at the galactic center. We consider three known dark matter density profiles such as the Cold Dark Matter, Scalar Field Dark Matter, and the Universal Rotation Curve from the Burkert profile. To achieve this goal, we used how the positional angles are measured by the Ishihara et al. method based on the Gauss-Bonnet theorem on the optical metric. With the help of the non-asymptotic form of the Gauss-Bonnet theorem, the longitudinal angle difference is also calculated. First, we find the emergence of apparent divergent terms on the said profiles, which indicates that the spacetime describing the black hole-dark matter combination is non-asymptotic. We showed that these apparent divergent terms vanish when the distance of the source and receiver are astronomically distant from the black hole. Using the current observational data in the Milky Way and M87 galaxies, we find interesting behaviors of how the weak deflection angle varies with the impact parameter, which gives us some hint on how dark matter interacts with the null particles for each dark matter density profile. We conclude that since these deviations are evident near the dark matter core radius, the weak deflection angle offers a better alternative for dark matter detection than using the deviation from the black hole shadow. With the dark matter profiles explored in this study, we find that the variation of the values for weak deflection angle strongly depends on the dark matter mass on a particular profile.

Automated summary

In this paper, the effect of dark matter on the weak deflection angle by black holes at the galactic center is investigated. Three known dark matter density profiles are considered and the positional angles are measured using the Ishihara et al. method. The emergence of apparent divergent terms on the dark matter profiles is found, but they vanish when the distance from the black hole is large. The weak deflection angle varies interestingly with the impact parameter, providing insights into the interaction between dark matter and null particles.