Description
The Habitable Worlds Observatory (HWO) is NASA's next-generation flagship space telescope, primarily designed to search for and directly image potentially habitable exoplanets. While its main focus is on planetary systems, HWO’s exceptional imaging capabilities—both in depth and resolution—also make it a powerful tool for advancing our understanding of cosmology. In this talk, I will highlight HWO’s unique potential to detect invisible dark matter halos as small as $10^7$M$_\odot$ through analyzing strong gravitational lensing images. These observations will place stringent constraints on the nature of dark matter, providing a definitive test of whether dark matter is composed of sterile neutrinos.
Primary author
Qiuhan He
(Durham University)
