Abstract
Recent work on the dynamics of elliptical galaxies suggests that it is possible to determine the radial distribution of mass in hot stellar systems using only line-of-sight velocities of a sample of stars, without any a priori assumptions about either the relative distribution of dark and luminous components, or the stellar velocity distribution. The technique differs from the point-by-point estimation of the gravitational acceleration in disk galaxies in that it requires the construction of a complete dynamical model describing the observed population. An algorithm is described which should yield strong, model-independent constraints on the central density of dark matter in dwarf spheroidal galaxies once the number of observed radial velocities reaches a few hundred.
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