Possible Evidence For Dark Matter Annihilation In The Inner Milky Way From The Fermi Gamma Ray Space Telescope

By L. Goodenough, D. Hooper. 2009

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We study the gamma rays observed by the Fermi Gamma Ray Space Telescope from the direction of the Galactic Center and find that their angular distribution and energy spectrum are well described by a dark matter annihilation scenario. In particular, we find a good fit to the data for dark matter particles with a 25-30 GeV mass, an annihilation cross section of ~9x10^-26 cm^3/s, and that are distributed with a cusped halo profile within the inner kiloparsec of the Galaxy. We cannot, however, exclude the possibility that these photons originate from an astrophysical source or sources with a similar morphology and spectral shape to those predicted in an annihilating dark matter scenario.

Subfields: Astronomy and Astrophysics, Nuclear and High Energy Physics, Statistical and Nonlinear Physics

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/9644635d1eb80cbcbcada075d93e4c116731ca62

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Citations in the corpus

The Fermi Galactic Center GeV Excess and Implications for Dark Matter (2017, background): “However, in our Sample Model the modified NFW profile is mainly motivated by earlier analyses of the GeV excess (Goodenough & Hooper 2009; Abazajian et al. 2014; Calore et al. 2015), which found it to be a good representation for the residual emission, with values of γ varying around ∼1.25.”
Background model systematics for the Fermi GeV excess (2014, methodology): “data. 7 Conclusions During the last few years the presence of a gamma-ray excess at GeV energies and towards the GC has been suggested by a sequence of studies performed using Fermi-LAT gammaray data [49,50,53{57,65,125,140]. Given the sphericity of the excess, its amplitude and the fact that it is ”
WIMP dark matter candidates and searches—current status and future prospects (2017, background): “9 They are also called super-WIMPs [279] or FIMPs [78] (feebly interacting massive particles, although the name of frozen-in massive particles would perhaps be more appropriate [10]) in this case.”
An Introduction to Particle Dark Matter (2019, background): “[40] the authors realised, after analysing data from the the Fermi gamma-ray space telescope, that there exists an excess of gamma-rays over the background in the center of our Galaxy.”
A tale of tails: Dark matter interpretations of the Fermi GeV excess in light of background model systematics (2014, methodology): “Indeed, an extended excess in gamma rays at the GC was reported by different independent groups [7 – 16], using data from the Fermi Large Area Telescope (LAT), and dubbed “ Fermi GeV excess ” as it appears to peak at energies around 1 – 3 GeV.”
Dark matter and pulsar model constraints from Galactic Center Fermi-LAT gamma-ray observations (2013, background): “[13] Lisa Goodenough and Dan Hooper, “Possible Evidence For Dark Matter Annihilation In The Inner Milky Way From The Fermi Gamma Ray Space Telescope,” (2009), arXiv:0910.”
The impact of baryonic physics on the structure of dark matter haloes: the view from the FIRE cosmological simulations (2015, background): “The signal is consistent with the annihilation rate of thermally produced weakly interacting massive particle dark matter (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…”