UC Santa Cruz

Although we have yet to fully understand the nature of dark matter (DM), astrophysical observations across the electromagnetic spectrum allow us to probe its properties and constrain proposed models. These include annihilating DM models that can be investigated through their standard model annihilation products such as electrons and positrons that produce radio, X-ray, and gamma-ray emission through typical radiative processes such as synchrotron radiation and inverse compton scattering. Some other proposed DM models exhibit collisional self interactions that impact the shapes of DM haloes. Using X-ray observations, the DM halo shapes can be constrained in order to probe the strength of possible DM self interactions. In this dissertation, I present an overview of our work in the development of the RX-DMFIT tool to study the secondary emission from DM annihilation, along with applications to DM and cosmic ray studies in the Andromeda galaxy. I also discuss work using data from Chandra and XMM-Newton in studying the X-ray shapes of elliptical galaxies to constrain DM self interactions.