On The Origin Of The Gamma Rays From The Galactic Center

By D. Hooper, T. Linden. 2011

449 citations recorded by the source corpus.

The region surrounding the center of the Milky Way is both astrophysically rich and complex, and is predicted to contain very high densities of dark matter. Utilizing three years of data from the Fermi Gamma Ray Space Telescope (and the recently available Pass 7 ultraclean event class), we study the morphology and spectrum of the gamma ray emission from this region and find evidence of a spatially extended component which peaks at energies between 300 MeV and 10 GeV. We compare our results to those reported by other groups and find good agreement. The extended emission could potentially originate from either the annihilations of dark matter particles in the inner galaxy, or from the collisions of high energy protons that are accelerated by the Milky Way's supermassive black hole with gas. If interpreted as dark matter annihilation products, the emission spectrum favors dark matter particles with a mass in the range of 7-12 GeV (if annihilating dominantly to leptons) or 25-45 GeV (if annihilating dominantly to hadronic final states). The intensity of the emission corresponds to a dark matter annihilation cross section consistent with that required to generate the observed cosmological abundance in the early universe (sigma v ~ 3 x 10^-26 cm^3/s). We also present conservative limits on the dark matter annihilation cross section which are at least as stringent as those derived from other observations.

Subfields: Astronomy and Astrophysics, Nuclear and High Energy Physics

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/5935291ba522c9be334ffcb00b56a843767b053a

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Citations in the corpus

DEVELOPMENT OF THE MODEL OF GALACTIC INTERSTELLAR EMISSION FOR STANDARD POINT-SOURCE ANALYSIS OF FERMI LARGE AREA TELESCOPE DATA (2016, background): “In this energy range, several studies have reported emission from the GC region in excess of the expectations from standard emission components (Vitale & Morselli 2009; Hooper & Linden 2011; Abazajian & Kaplinghat 2012; Calore et al. 2015).”
Toward (finally!) ruling out Z and Higgs mediated dark matter models (2016, background): “In the currently allowed mass range near the Higgs pole, this class of models predicts a very small low-velocity annihilation cross section, which is likely unable to generate the measured intensity of the Galactic Center gamma-ray excess [42–48] (see also, Refs.”
Extended gamma-ray emission from Coy Dark Matter (2014, methodology): “Evidence for a spatially extended excess of gamma-rays in this region was initially found in [10] and subsequently confirmed by several independent analyses [11–17].”
Background model systematics for the Fermi GeV excess (2014, unknown): “The most exciting interpretation of the GCE is that it is caused by the annihilation of DM particles, and indeed all of the previous studies analyzing Fermi -LAT data focus on this possibility [49–55, 57].”
Dark nuclei. I. Cosmology and indirect detection (2014, background): “Having discussed the broad indirect detection features of dark nucleosynthesis, we will now show the utility of this process by entertaining the possibility that the gamma ray excess at the galactic center is due to DM [81–89], specifically considering an interpretation in terms of dark nucleosynthe”
Gamma Ray Signals from Dark Matter: Concepts, Status and Prospects (2012, background): “There are also claims that limits from GC [185, 189] or globular cluster [172] observations are actually stronger (though seemingly much less robust) than the dwarf limits.”
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”