An unexpected high concentration for the dark substructure in the gravitational lens SDSSJ0946+1006

TL;DR

This paper reports the discovery of an unusually dense and dark substructure in a gravitational lens, challenging standard $ ext{Lambda}$CDM predictions and suggesting the need for revised models of dark matter distribution.

Contribution

It provides the first detailed analysis of a highly concentrated dark subhalo in a lens galaxy, highlighting a significant discrepancy with $ ext{Lambda}$CDM expectations.

Findings

The subhalo has an extraordinarily high concentration and steep density profile.

The inferred subhalo is dark matter dominated with very low luminosity.

Such dense subhalos are rare in $ ext{Lambda}$CDM} simulations, indicating a potential tension with standard cosmological models.

Abstract

The presence of an invisible substructure has previously been detected in the gravitational lens galaxy SDSSJ0946+1006 through its perturbation of the lensed images. Using flexible models for the main halo and the subhalo perturbation to fit the lensed images, we demonstrate that the subhalo has an extraordinarily high central density and steep density slope. The inferred concentration for the subhalo is well above the expected scatter in concentrations for $\Lambda$CDM halos of similar mass. We robustly infer the subhalo's projected mass within 1 kpc to be $\sim 2$-$3.7\times 10^9$M$_\odot$ at $>$95% CL for all our lens models, while the average slope of the subhalo's projected density profile over the radial range 0.75-1.25 kpc is constrained to be steeper than isothermal ($\gamma_{2D} \lesssim -1$). By modeling the subhalo light directly, we infer a conservative upper bound on its luminosity $L_V < 1.2\times 10^8L_\odot$ at 95% CL, which shows that the perturber is dark matter dominated. To compare to $\Lambda$CDM expectations, we analyze subhalos within analogues of lensing galaxies in the Illustris TNG100-1 simulation over many lines of sight, and find hundreds of subhalos that achieve a projected mass within 1 kpc of $\gtrsim 2\times10^9M_\odot$. However, less than 1% of the mock observations yield a log-slope steep enough to be consistent with our lensing models, and they $all$ have stellar masses in excess of that allowed by observations by about an order of magnitude or more. We conclude that the presence of such a dark, highly concentrated subhalo is unexpected in a $\Lambda$CDM universe. Finally, we show that this tension with CDM is not significantly reduced if the perturber is assumed to be a line-of-sight structure, rather than a subhalo.