FERMI-LAT OBSERVATIONS OF HIGH-ENERGY γ-RAY EMISSION TOWARD THE GALACTIC CENTER

By M. Ajello, A. Albert, W. Atwood, G. Barbiellini, D. Bastieri, K. Bechtol, R. Bellazzini, E. Bissaldi, R. Blandford, E. Bloom and 113 more. 2015

348 citations recorded by the source corpus.

The Fermi Large Area Telescope (LAT) has provided the most detailed view to date of the emission toward the Galactic center (GC) in high-energy γ-rays. This paper describes the analysis of data taken during the first 62 months of the mission in the energy range 1–100 GeV from a 15° × 15° region about the direction of the GC. Specialized interstellar emission models (IEMs) are constructed to enable the separation of the γ-ray emissions produced by cosmic ray particles interacting with the interstellar gas and radiation fields in the Milky Way into that from the inner ∼1 kpc surrounding the GC, and that from the rest of the Galaxy. A catalog of point sources for the 15° × 15° region is self-consistently constructed using these IEMs: the First Fermi-LAT Inner Galaxy Point Source Catalog (1FIG). The spatial locations, fluxes, and spectral properties of the 1FIG sources are presented, and compared with γ-ray point sources over the same region taken from existing catalogs. After subtracting the interstellar emission and point-source contributions a residual is found. If templates that peak toward the GC are used to model the positive residual the agreement with the data improves, but none of the additional templates tried account for all of its spatial structure. The spectrum of the positive residual modeled with these templates has a strong dependence on the choice of IEM.

Subfields: Astronomy and Astrophysics, Nuclear and High Energy Physics

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/50dea27ddc23891ce9de3be7ab5c4079b859fa6f

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Citations in the corpus

Cosmic-ray propagation with DRAGON2: I. numerical solver and astrophysical ingredients (2016, background): “Concerning gamma-rays, the Large Area Telescope (LAT) on board of the Fermi GammaRay Space Telescope [14] has been releasing refined all-sky maps – as well as detailed imaging and spectral information of very interesting regions like the Galactic Center (GC) [15] and of extended sources like Superno”
SEARCHING FOR DARK MATTER ANNIHILATION IN RECENTLY DISCOVERED MILKY WAY SATELLITES WITH FERMI-LAT (2016, background): “In addition, observations of the dSphs provide an important independent test of DM interpretations of the γ-ray excess associated with the Galactic center (GCE; Gordon & Macias 2013; Daylan et al. 2016; Abazajian et al. 2014; Calore et al. 2015; Ajello et al. 2016).”
Sensitivity projections for dark matter searches with the Fermi large area telescope (2016, background): “Although the existence and spatial extension of the excess have been found to be robust against uncertainties ofmodeling the Galactic diffuse γ -ray emission, themeasured spectrum of the excess has been shown to depend strongly on the Galactic diffuse emission model [67,67,81,84,85].”
The Fermi Galactic Center GeV Excess and Implications for Dark Matter (2017, methodology): “Ajello et al. (2016) studied in detail the different components of gamma-ray emission toward the GC and confirmed that a residual component is consistently found above interstellar emission and sources, and that its spectrum is highly dependent on the choice of interstellar emission model.”