HALO EXPANSION IN COSMOLOGICAL HYDRO SIMULATIONS: TOWARD A BARYONIC SOLUTION OF THE CUSP/CORE PROBLEM IN MASSIVE SPIRALS

A clear prediction of the cold dark matter (CDM) model is the existence of cuspy dark matter halo density profiles on all mass scales. This is not in agreement with the observed rotation curves of spiral galaxies, challenging on small scales the otherwise successful CDM paradigm. In this work we employ high-resolution cosmological hydrodynamical simulations to study the effects of dissipative processes on the inner distribution of dark matter …