2016ApJ...826L..23E

In simulations of the standard cosmological model (ΛCDM), dark matter halos are aspherical. However, so far the asphericity of an individual galaxy's halo has never been robustly established. We use the Jeans equations to define a quantity that robustly characterizes a deviation from rotational symmetry. This quantity is essentially the gravitational torque and it roughly provides the ellipticity projected along the line of sight. We show that the Thirty Meter Telescope (TMT), with a single epoch of observations combined with those of the Gaia Space Telescope, can distinguish the ΛCDM value of the torque from zero for each Sculptor-like dwarf galaxy with a confidence between 0 and 5σ, depending on the orientation of each halo. With two epochs of observations, TMT will achieve a 5σ discovery of torque and thus asphericity for most such galaxies, thus providing a new and powerful test of the ΛCDM model.