If a component of the dark matter has dissipative interactions, it could collapse to form a thin dark disk in our Galaxy that is coplanar with the baryonic disk. It has been suggested that dark disks could explain a variety of observed phenomena, including periodic comet impacts. Using the first data release from the Gaia space observatory, we search for a dark disk via its effect on stellar kinematics in the Milky Way. Our new limits disfavor the presence of a thin dark matter disk, and we present updated measurements on the total matter density in the Solar neighborhood.

The Milky Way's Galactic Center harbors a gamma-ray excess that is a candidate signal of annihilating dark matter. Dwarf galaxies remain predominantly dark in their expected commensurate emission. In this work we quantify the degree of consistency between these two observations through a joint likelihood analysis. In doing so we incorporate Milky Way dark matter halo profile uncertainties, as well as an accounting of diffuse gamma-ray emission uncertainties in dark matter annihilation models for the Galactic Center Extended gamma-ray excess (GCE) detected by the Fermi Gamma-Ray Space Telescope. The preferred range of annihilation rates and masses expands when including these unknowns. Even so, using two recent determinations of the Milky Way halo's local density leave the GCE preferred region of single-channel dark matter annihilation models to be in strong tension with annihilation searches in combined dwarf galaxy analyses. A third, higher Milky Way density determination, alleviates this tension. Our joint likelihood analysis allows us to quantify this inconsistency. We provide a set of tools for testing dark matter annihilation models' consistency within this combined dataset. As an example, we test a representative inverse Compton sourced self-interacting dark matter model, which is consistent with both the GCE and dwarfs.

This white paper summarizes the workshop "U.S. Cosmic Visions: New Ideas in Dark Matter" held at University of Maryland on March 23-25, 2017.