Is Cold Dark Matter Still a Strong Buy? The Lesson from Galaxy Clusters

For the last few years the Cold Dark Matter model (ticker: CDM), has been the dominant theory of structure formation. We briefly review the recent advancements and predictions of the model in the field of galaxy clusters. A new set of very high resolution simulations of galaxy clusters show that they have (1) density profiles with central slopes very close to −1.6 and (2) abundance of subhalos similar to the ones observed in real clusters. These results show a remarkably small cluster to cluster variation and a weak dependence from the particular CDM cosmology chosen (LCDM having ∼ 40% less substructure than SCDM). While still a speculative theory with a high prediction/evidence ratio, subject to strong challenges from observational data and competition from other hierarchical theories, we give CDM a rating of “market outperform” and of “long term BUY”.