Constraining properties of dark matter particles using astrophysical data

A microscopic origin of dark matter phenomenon is the most plausible hypothesis to explain the mystery of dark matter. The dark matter particle hypothesis necessarily implies an extension of the Standard Model. In this thesis, we undertook a systematic model-independent program of studying the properties of decaying dark matter. By analyzing the experimental data for dwarf spheroidal galaxies it was shown that the X-ray energy range is a preferred region when searching for radiatively decaying dark matter. By analyzing dark matter distributions in different types of galaxies and in galaxy clusters we show that the expected dark matter signal increases slowly with the mass of the object. Therefore, dwarf and spiral galaxies are the observational targets with the optimal signal-to-noise ratio. To probe the theoretically interesting regions of particle physics models we performed a combined analysis of a very large dataset of archival XMM-Newton observations of galaxies. Finally, we discussed an ultimate way to probe the whole parameter space of minimal models of decaying dark matter. We argue that a new X-ray telescope with the narrow energy resolution (comparable to internal width of the line) and large field-of-view is required.