Abstract

Analysis of the rotation curves (RCs) of spiral galaxies provides an efficient diagnostic for studying the properties of dark matter halos and their relations with baryonic material. Since the cored pseudo-isothermal (Iso) model usually provides a better description of observed RCs than does the cuspy Navarro-Frenk-White (NFW) model, there have been concerns that the Lambda CDM primordial density fluctuation spectrum may not be the correct one. We have modeled the RCs of galaxies from The Hi Nearby Galaxy Survey (THINGS) with the Einasto halo model, which has emerged as the best-fitting model of the halos arising in dissipationless cosmological N-body simulations. We find that the RCs are significantly better fit with the Einasto halo than with either Iso or NFW halo models. In our best-fit Einasto models, the radius of density slope -2 and the density at this radius are highly correlated. The Einasto index, which controls the overall shape of the density profile, is near unity on average for intermediate and low mass halos. This is not in agreement with the predictions from Lambda CDM simulations. The indices of the most massive halos are in rough agreement with those cosmological simulations and appear correlated with the halo virial mass. We find that a typical Einasto density profile declines more strongly in its outermost parts than any of the Iso or NFW models whereas it is relatively shallow in its innermost regions. The core nature of those regions of halos thus extends the cusp-core controversy found for the NFW model with low surface density galaxies to the Einasto halo with more massive galaxies like those of THINGS. The Einasto concentrations decrease as a function of halo mass, in agreement with trends seen in numerical simulations. However, they are generally smaller than values expected for simulated Einasto halos. We thus find that, so far, the Einasto halo model provides the best match to the observed RCs and can therefore be considered as a new standard model for dark matter halos.