In cold dark matter cosmological models, structures form and grow through the merging of smaller units. Numerical simulations have shown that such merging is incomplete; the inner cores of haloes survive and orbit as 'subhaloes' within their hosts. Here we report a simulation that resolves such substructure even in the very inner regions of the Galactic halo. We find hundreds of very concentrated dark matter clumps surviving near the solar circle, as well as numerous cold streams. The simulation also reveals the fractal nature of dark matter clustering: isolated haloes and subhaloes contain the same relative amount of substructure and both have cusped inner density profiles. The inner mass and phase-space densities of subhaloes match those of recently discovered faint, dark-matter-dominated dwarf satellite galaxies, and the overall amount of substructure can explain the anomalous flux ratios seen in strong gravitational lenses. Subhaloes boost gamma-ray production from dark matter annihilation by factors of 4 to 15 relative to smooth galactic models. Local cosmic ray production is also enhanced, typically by a factor of 1.4 but by a factor of more than 10 in one per cent of locations lying sufficiently close to a large subhalo. (These estimates assume that the gravitational effects of baryons on dark matter substructure are small.).

The coalescence of a massive black hole (MBH) binary leads to the gravitational-wave recoil of the system and its ejection from the galaxy core. We have carried out N-body simulations of the motion of a M BH = 3.7 × 10 6 M MBH remnant in the "Via Lactea I" simulation, a Milky Way-sized dark matter halo. The black hole receives a recoil velocity of V kick = 80, 120, 200, 300, and 400 km s −1 at redshift 1.5, and its orbit is followed for over 1 Gyr within a "live" host halo, subject only to gravity and dynamical friction against the dark matter background. We show that, owing to asphericities in the dark matter potential, the orbit of the MBH is highly nonradial, resulting in a significantly increased decay timescale compared to a spherical halo. The simulations are used to construct a semi-analytic model of the motion of the MBH in a time-varying triaxial Navarro-Frenk-White dark matter halo plus a spherical stellar bulge, where the dynamical friction force is calculated directly from the velocity dispersion tensor. Such a model should offer a realistic picture of the dynamics of kicked MBHs in situations where gas drag, friction by disk stars, and the flattening of the central cusp by the returning black hole are all negligible effects. We find that MBHs ejected with initial recoil velocities V kick 500 km s −1 do not return to the host center within a Hubble time. In a Milky Way-sized galaxy, a recoiling hole carrying a gaseous disk of initial mass ∼ M BH may shine as a quasar for a substantial fraction of its "wandering" phase. The long decay timescales of kicked MBHs predicted by this study may thus be favorable to the detection of off-nuclear quasar activity.