Dark matter and dark energy in dwarf galaxy systems

Quantitative estimates of themaximumallowed totalmasses and sizes of the dark-matter halos in groups and associations of dwarf galaxies—special types of metagalactic populations identified in recent astronomical observations with the Hubble Space Telescope—are presented. Dwarf-galaxy systems are formed of isolated dark-matter halos with a small number of dark galaxies embedded in them. Data on the sizes of these systems and the velocity dispersions of the embedded galaxies can be used to determine lower limits on the total dark-halo masses using the virial theorem. Upper limits follow from the conditions that the systems immersed in the cosmic dark-energy background be gravitationally bound. The median maximum masses are close to 10¹² M _⊙ for both groups and associations of dwarf galaxies, although the median virial masses for these two types of systems differ by approximately a factor of ten.