Astrophysical and dark matter interpretations of extended gamma-ray emission from the Galactic Center

By K. Abazajian, Nicolas Canac, S. Horiuchi, M. Kaplinghat. 2014

338 citations recorded by the source corpus.

We construct empirical models of the diffuse gamma-ray background toward the Galactic Center. Including all known point sources and a template of emission associated with interactions of cosmic rays with molecular gas, we show that the extended emission observed previously in the Fermi Large Area Telescope data toward the Galactic Center is detected at high significance for all permutations of the diffuse model components. However, we find that the fluxes and spectra of the sources in our model change significantly depending on the background model. In particular, the spectrum of the central Sgr A* source is less steep than in previous works and the recovered spectrum of the extended emission has large systematic uncertainties, especially at lower energies. If the extended emission is interpreted to be due to dark matter annihilation, we find annihilation into pure b-quark and τ-lepton channels to be statistically equivalent goodness of fits. In the case of the pure b-quark channel, we find a dark matter mass of 39.4(+3.7-2.9stat)(±7.9sys)GeV, while a pure τ+τ - channel case has an estimated dark matter mass of 9.43(+0.63-0.52stat)(±1.2sys)GeV. Alternatively, if the extended emission is interpreted to be astrophysical in origin such as due to unresolved millisecond pulsars, we obtain strong bounds on dark matter annihilation, although systematic uncertainties due to the dependence on the background models are significant. © 2014 American Physical Society.

Subfields: Nuclear and High Energy Physics

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/1655e0537c64cbd9ed36f1d83ce12656968fe25d

How researchers see this paper

The researchers whose trusted networks rank it highest, strongest advocate first. Every researcher gets a different order.

In Nuclear and High Energy Physics

Citations in the corpus

Galactic Center gamma-ray ``excess'' from an active past of the Galactic Centre? (2014, background): “Very recently, in [11, 14] some effort was put in quantifying some of these systematics, and it was concluded that in particular below 1 GeV the shape of the spectrum is highly model dependent.”
FERMI-LAT OBSERVATIONS OF HIGH-ENERGY γ-RAY EMISSION TOWARD THE GALACTIC CENTER (2015, background): “…of the data toward the region surrounding the GC have been made by various authors (Goodenough & Hooper 2009; Hooper & Goodenough 2011; Abazajian & Kaplinghat 2012; Hooper & Slatyer 2013; Gordon & Macı́as 2013; Huang et al. 2013; Abazajian et al. 2014; Daylan et al. 2014; Calore et al. 2015a).”
Background model systematics for the Fermi GeV excess (2014, background): “s astrophysical processes. Firstly, the excess gamma-ray emission could originate from a population of gamma-ray MSPs associated with the central stellar cluster and not yet detected by the Fermi-LAT [54,64{66] (as already suggested in ref. [67] years ago using EGRET data). Recently, several argumen”
DWARF GALAXY ANNIHILATION AND DECAY EMISSION PROFILES FOR DARK MATTER EXPERIMENTS (2014, background): “…PA 15213; mgwalker@andrew.cmu.edu pecially interesting in the context of recent claims of a Galactic center gamma-ray excess and associated dark matter interpretation (e.g. Hooper & Goodenough 2011; Boyarsky et al. 2011; Abazajian & Kaplinghat 2012, 2013; Abazajian et al. 2014; Daylan et al. 2014).”
The impact of baryonic physics on the structure of dark matter haloes: the view from the FIRE cosmological simulations (2015, background): “…(Goodenough & Hooper 2009; Hooper & Goodenough 2011; Hooper & Linden 2011; Boyarsky et al. 2011; Abazajian & Kapling- c© 0000 RAS, MNRAS 000, 000–000 hat 2012; Gordon & Macías 2013; Macias & Gordon 2014; Abazajian et al. 2014) although other possibilities remain valid alternatives (Abazajian 2011).”
An Introduction to Particle Dark Matter (2019, neutral): “[2, 27, 42].”
SEARCH FOR GAMMA-RAY EMISSION FROM DES DWARF SPHEROIDAL GALAXY CANDIDATES WITH FERMI-LAT DATA (2015, background): “The population of nearby DM-dominated dSphs represents an independent set of targets to test possible signals of DM annihilation in other regions such as the Galactic center (e.g., Gordon & Macias 2013; Abazajian et al 2014; Calore et al. 2015; Daylan et al. 2014).”
SEARCHING FOR DARK MATTER ANNIHILATION IN RECENTLY DISCOVERED MILKY WAY SATELLITES WITH FERMI-LAT (2016, background): “The limits derived from LAT data coincident with confirmed and candidate dSphs do not yet conclusively confirm or refute a DM interpretation of the GCE (Gordon & Macias 2013; Daylan et al. 2016; Abazajian et al. 2014; Calore et al. 2015).”
A tale of tails: Dark matter interpretations of the Fermi GeV excess in light of background model systematics (2014, methodology): “In most of the previous studies on the GeV excess [11,12,14,15,24] the contribution from the Galactic diffuse emission has been modeled by using the P6V11 model provided by the Fermi-LAT Collaboration.”
Gravitational probes of dark matter physics (2017, background): “Indirect detection searches for dark matter annihilation or decay in the Universe today can improve signal over background by targeting high-density regions — be it the Galactic Center [441, 442, 443, 444, 445, 446, 447, 448, 449, 450, 451, 452, 453, 454, 455, 456], satellite galaxies [457, 458, 459”