Copyright © 2010 W. J. G. de Blok. This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.

Abstract

This paper gives an overview of the attempts to determine the distribution of dark matter in low surface brightness disk and gas-rich dwarf galaxies, both through observations and computer simulations. Observations seem to indicate an approximately constant dark matter density in the inner parts of galaxies, while cosmological computer simulations indicate a steep power-law-like behaviour. This difference has become known as the “core/cusp problem,” and it remains one of the unsolved problems in small-scale cosmology.