Mass classification of dark matter perturbers of stellar tidal streams

Abstract

Stellar streams formed by tidal stripping of progenitors orbiting around the Milky Way are expected to be perturbed by encounters with dark matter subhalos. Recent studies have shown that they are an excellent proxy to infer properties of the perturbers, such as their mass. Here we present two different methodologies that make use of the fully non-Gaussian density distribution of stellar streams: a Bayesian model selection based on the probability density function (PDF) of stellar density, and a likelihood-free gradient boosting classifier. While the schemes do not assume a specific dark matter model, we are mainly interested in discerning the primordial black holes cold dark matter (PBH CDM) hypothesis form the standard particle dark matter one. Therefore, as an application we forecast model selection strength of evidence for cold dark matter clusters of masses 103–105M⊙ and 105–109M⊙, based on a GD-1-like stellar stream and including realistic observational errors. Evidence for the smaller mass range, so far under-explored, is particularly interesting for PBH CDM. We expect weak to strong evidence for model selection based on the PDF analysis, depending on the fiducial model. Instead, the gradient boosting model is a highly efficient classifier (99% accuracy) for all mass ranges here considered. As a further test of the robustness of the method, we reach similar conclusions when performing forecasts further dividing the largest mass range into 105–107M⊙ and 107–109M⊙ ranges.