Dark Matter Phenomenology in Astrophysical Systems

Sammanfattning: There is now a great deal of evidence in support of the existence of a large amount of unseen gravitational mass, commonly called dark matter, from observations in astrophysical systems of sizes ranging from that of dwarf galaxies to the scale of the entire Universe. One of the most promising explanations for this unseen mass is that it consists of a species of unobserved elementary particles. An expected feature of particle dark matter is that it should form halos in the early Universe that cannot collapse due to its weak interactions with itself and baryonic matter. It is within these halos that galaxies, including the Milky Way, which is the galaxy that we inhabit, are thought to be born.Different methods to detect dark matter that originates from the galactic halo have been devised and these generally fall into the categories of direct and indirect detection. On Earth, direct detection experiments are employed to detect the recoiling atoms that are generated through the occasional scattering between halo dark matter particles with the detector material. The indirect search for dark matter is conducted by attempting to detect the standard model particles that may be produced as dark matter annihilates or decays and by looking for the effects that dark matter may have on astrophysical bodies. The aim of this thesis is to study the effects that dark matter may have in different astrophysical systems and how its properties can be determined should an effect that is due to dark matter be detected.The Sun currently experiences the solar composition problem, which is a mismatch between simulated and observed helioseismological properties of the Sun. A large abundance of dark matter introduces a new heat transfer mechanism that has been shown to offer a viable solution. This problem is discussed here in a particular model of dark matter where the dark matter halo is made up of equal numbers of particles and antiparticles. It is shown that dark matter arising from the thermal freeze-out mechanism might alleviate the problem, whereas only asymmetric dark matter models have previously been considered.If a dark matter signal is seen in a direct detection experiment, the determination of the dark matter properties will be plagued by numerous uncertainties related to the halo. It has been shown that many of these uncertainties can be eliminated by comparing signals in different direct detection experiments in what is called ``halo-independent" methods. These methods can also be used to predict the neutrino signal from dark matter annihilating in the Sun, further constraining DM properties, if a direct detection experiment detects a signal. This framework is here generalized to inelastic dark matter and the information concerning dark matter properties in a direct detection signal is discussed.When the Sun captures dark matter, thermalization is a process where dark matter particles lose their remaining kinetic energy after being captured and sink into the solar core. Evaporation due to collisions with high-energy solar atoms is also possible. For inelastic dark matter, it is expected that the thermalization process stops prematurely, which will have an effect on the expected neutrino signal from its annihilation. Moreover, evaporation may also be significant due transitions from the heavier to the lighter state. Here, the thermalization problem is discussed, and results from numerical simulations are presented that show the extent to which inelastic dark matter thermalizes and if evaporation has to be taken into account.A number of issues have been observed in dark matter halos at smaller scales when compared to results from large simulations. Dark matter that interacts strongly with itself has been proposed as a solution. There are a number of problems associated with these models that are excluded by other means. A particular model of inelastic dark matter interacting via a light mediator is analyzed here and shown to possible alleviate at least some of the problems associated with models of this kind.