A recent study , making use of the number of horizontal branch stars observed in infrared photometric surveys and kinematic measurements of M-giant stars from the BRAVA survey , combined with N-body simulations of stellar populations , has presented a new determination of the dark matter mass within the bulge-bar region of the Milky Way .
That study constrains the total mass within the \pm 2.2 \times \pm 1.4 \times \pm 1.2 kpc volume of the bulge-bar region to be ( 1.84 \pm 0.07 ) \times 10 ^ { 10 } M _ { \odot } , of which 9-30 % is made up of dark matter .
Here , we use this result to constrain the the Milky Way ’ s dark matter density profile , and discuss the implications for indirect dark matter searches .
Although uncertainties remain significant , these results favor dark matter distributions with a cusped density profile .
For example , for a scale radius of 20 kpc and a local dark matter density of 0.4 GeV/cm ^ { 3 } , density profiles with an inner slope of 0.69 to 1.40 are favored , approximately centered around the standard NFW value .
In contrast , profiles with large flat-density cores are disfavored by this information .