Cuspy dark matter haloes and the Galaxy

The microlensing optical depth to Baade's Window constrains the minimum total mass in baryonic matter within the Solar circle to be greater than similar to3.9 x 10(10) M-., assuming the inner Galaxy is barred with viewing angle similar to 20 degrees. From the kinematics of solar neighbourhood stars, the local surface density of dark matter is similar to 30 +/- 15 M-. pc(-2). We construct cuspy haloes normalized to the local dark matter density and calculate the circular-speed curve of the halo in the inner Galaxy. This is added in quadrature to the rotation curve provided by the stellar and ISM discs, together with a bar sufficiently massive so that the baryonic matter in the inner Galaxy reproduces the microlensing optical depth. Such models violate the observational constraint provided by the tangent-velocity data in the inner Galaxy (typically at radii 2-4 kpc). The high baryonic contribution required by the microlensing is consistent with implications from hydrodynamical modelling and the pattern speed of the Galactic bar. We conclude that the cuspy haloes favoured by the cold dark matter cosmology (and its variants) are inconsistent with the observational data on the Galaxy.