The Fermi Large Area Telescope has observed an excess of ~GeV energy gamma rays from the center of the Milky Way, which may arise from near-thermal dark matter annihilation. Firmly establishing the dark matter origin for this excess is however complicated by challenges in modeling diffuse cosmic-ray foregrounds as well as unresolved astrophysical sources, such as millisecond pulsars. Non-Poissonian Template Fitting (NPTF) is one statistical technique that has previously been used to show that at least some fraction of the GeV excess is likely due to a population of dim point sources. These results were recently called into question by Leane and Slatyer (2019), who showed that a synthetic dark matter annihilation signal injected on top of the real Fermi data is not recovered by the NPTF procedure. In this work, we perform a dedicated study of the Fermi data and explicitly show that the central result of Leane and Slatyer (2019) is likely driven by the fact that their choice of model for the Galactic foreground emission does not provide a sufficiently good description of the data. We repeat the NPTF analyses using a state-of-the-art model for diffuse gamma-ray emission in the Milky Way and introduce a novel statistical procedure, based on spherical-harmonic marginalization, to provide an improved description of the Galactic diffuse emission in a data-driven fashion. With these improvements, we find that the NPTF results continue to robustly favor the interpretation that the Galactic Center excess is due, in part, to unresolved astrophysical point sources across the analysis variations that we have explored.
The Galactic Center GeV excess (GCE) has garnered great interest as a possible signal of either dark matter annihilation or some novel astrophysical phenomenon, such as a new population of gamma-ray emitting pulsars. In a companion paper, we showed that in a $10^\circ$ radius region of interest (ROI) surrounding the Galactic Center, apparent evidence for GCE point sources (PSs) from non-Poissonian template fitting (NPTF) is actually an artifact of unmodeled north-south asymmetry of the GCE. In this work, we develop a simplified analytic description of how signal mismodeling can drive an appare…
We perform a composite likelihood analysis of subdivided regions within the central $26^\circ\times20^\circ$ of the Milky Way, with the aim of characterizing the spectrum of the gamma-ray galactic center excess in regions of varying galactocentric distance. Outside of the innermost few degrees, we find that the radial profile of the excess is background-model dependent and poorly constrained. The spectrum of the excess emission is observed to extend upwards of 10 GeV outside $\sim5^\circ$ in radius, but cuts off steeply between 10--20 GeV only in the innermost few degrees. If interpreted as a …
Using gamma-ray data from the Fermi Large Area Telescope, various groups have identified a clear excess emission in the Inner Galaxy, at energies around a few GeV. This excess resembles remarkably well a signal from dark-matter annihilation. One of the most compelling astrophysical interpretations is that the excess is caused by the combined effect of a previously undetected population of dim gamma-ray sources. Because of their spectral similarity, the best candidates are millisecond pulsars. Here, we search for this hypothetical source population, using a novel approach based on wavelet decom…
Statistical evidence has previously suggested that the Galactic Center GeV Excess (GCE) originates largely from point sources, and not from annihilating dark matter. We examine the impact of unmodeled source populations on identifying the true origin of the GCE using non-Poissonian template fitting (NPTF) methods. In a proof-of-principle example with simulated data, we discover that unmodeled sources in the Fermi Bubbles can lead to a dark matter signal being misattributed to point sources by the NPTF. We discover striking behavior consistent with a mismodeling effect in the real Fermi data, f…
Since the discovery of an excess in gamma rays in the direction of M31, its cause has been unclear. Published interpretations focus on a dark matter or stellar related origin. Studies of a similar excess in the Milky Way center motivate a correlation of the spatial morphology of the signal with the distribution of stellar mass in M31. However, a robust determination of the best theory for the observed excess emission is very challenging due to large uncertainties in the astrophysical gamma-ray foreground model. Here we perform a spectro-morphological analysis of the M31 gamma-ray excess using …
The Galactic Center Excess (GCE) of GeV gamma rays can be explained as a signal of annihilating dark matter or of emission from unresolved astrophysical sources, such as millisecond pulsars. Evidence for the latter is provided by a statistical procedure---referred to as Non-Poissonian Template Fitting (NPTF)---that distinguishes the smooth distribution of photons expected for dark matter annihilation from a "clumpy" photon distribution expected for point sources. In this paper, we perform an extensive study of the NPTF on simulated data, exploring its ability to recover the flux and luminosity…
Several groups have identified an extended excess of gamma rays over the modeled foreground and background emissions towards the Galactic center (GC) based on observations with the Fermi Large Area Telescope. This excess emission is compatible in morphology and spectrum with a telltale sign from dark matter (DM) annihilation. Here, we present a critical reassessment of DM interpretations of the GC signal in light of the foreground and background uncertainties that some of us recently outlaid in Calore et al. 2014. We find that a much larger number of DM models fits the gamma-ray data than prev…
Stellar-like Galactic center excess challenges particle dark matter
Sorbonne Université（索邦大学）；Laboratoire de Physique Théorique et Hautes Énergies (LPTHE), CNRS（高能理论物理实验室，法国国家科学研究中心）；LAPTh, CNRS（理论物理实验室，法国国家科学研究中心）；Univ. of Nova Gorica（新戈里察大学）；University of Torino（都灵大学）；Istituto Nazionale di Fisica Nucleare（意大利国家核物理研究所）
The leading explanation of the $\textit{Fermi}$ Galactic center $γ$-ray excess is the extended emission from a unresolved population of millisecond pulsars (MSPs) in the Galactic bulge. Such a population would, along with the prompt $γ$ rays, also inject large quantities of electrons/positrons ($e^\pm$) into the interstellar medium. These $e^\pm$ could potentially inverse-Compton (IC) scatter ambient photons into $γ$ rays that fall within the sensitivity range of the upcoming Cherenkov Telescope Array (CTA). In this article, we examine the detection potential of CTA to this signature by making…
Studies of Fermi data indicate an excess of GeV gamma rays around the Galactic center (GC), possibly due to dark matter. We show that young gamma-ray pulsars can yield a similar signal. First, a high concentration of GC supernovae naturally leads to a population of kicked pulsars symmetric about the GC. Second, while very-young pulsars with soft spectra reside near the Galactic plane, pulsars with spectra that have hardened with age accumulate at larger angles. This combination, including unresolved foreground pulsars, traces the morphology and spectrum of the Excess.
Several groups have recently claimed evidence for an unaccounted gamma-ray excess over {the} diffuse backgrounds at few GeV in {the} Fermi-LAT data in a region around the Galactic Center, consistent with a dark matter annihilation origin. We demonstrate that the main spectral and angular features of this excess can be reproduced if they are mostly due to inverse Compton emission from high-energy electrons injected in a burst event of ~10^52 - 10^53erg roughly O(10^6) years ago. We consider this example as a proof of principle that time-dependent phenomena need to be understood and accounted fo…
The center of the Milky Way is offering one of the most striking mystery in Astroparticle Physics. An excess of gamma rays (GCE) has been measured by several groups in the data collected by the Fermi Large Area Telescope (LAT) towards the Galactic center region. The spectrum and spatial morphology of the GCE have been claimed by some groups to be compatible with a signal from the Galactic halo of dark matter (DM). Instead, other analyses have demonstrated that the GCE properties, e.g., its energy spectrum, highly depend on the choice of the Galactic interstellar emission (IEM) model source cat…
Gamma rays and microwave observations of the Galactic Center and surrounding areas indicate the presence of anomalous emission, whose origin remains ambiguous. The possibility of dark matter (DM) annihilation explaining both signals through prompt emission at gamma-rays and secondary emission at microwave frequencies from interactions of high-energy electrons produced in annihilation with the Galactic magnetic fields has attracted much interest in recent years. We investigate the DM interpretation of the Galactic Center gamma-ray excess by searching for the associated synchrotron in the WMAP-P…
Recently, a spatially extended excess of gamma rays collected by the Fermi-LAT from the inner region of the Milky Way has been detected by different groups and with increasingly sophisticated techniques. Yet, any final conclusion about the morphology and spectral properties of such an extended diffuse emission are subject to a number of potentially critical uncertainties, related to the high density of cosmic rays, gas, magnetic fields and abundance of point sources. We will present a thorough study of the systematic uncertainties related to the modelling of diffuse background and to the propa…
The Milky Way halo is the brightest source of dark matter annihilation on the sky. Indeed, the potential strength of the Galactic dark matter signal can supersede that expected from dwarf galaxies and galaxy groups even in regions away from the Inner Galaxy. In this paper, we present the results of a search for dark matter annihilation in the smooth Milky Way halo for $|b| > 20^\circ$ and $r < 50^\circ$ using 413 weeks of Fermi Pass 8 data within the energy range of $\sim$0.8-50 GeV. We exclude thermal dark matter with mass below $\sim$70 GeV that annihilates to $b\bar{b}$ at the 95% confidenc…
We present the effective $J$-factors for the Milky Way for scenarios in which dark matter annihilation is p-wave or d-wave suppressed. We find that the velocity suppression of dark matter annihilation can have a sizable effect on the morphology of a potential dark matter annihilation signal in the Galactic Center. The gamma-ray flux from the innermost region of the Galactic Center is in particular suppressed. We find that for dark matter density profiles with steep inner slopes, the morphology of the Inner Galaxy gamma-ray emission in p-wave models can be made similar to the morphology in stan…
Recent studies have demonstrated that the emission from the circumgalactic medium of the Milky Way displays a relatively high degree of patchiness on angular scales of $\sim10^\circ$. Taking advantage of the Spectrum Roentgen Gamma eROSITA Final Equatorial Depth Survey (eFEDS), we aim to constrain any variation in the soft X-ray surface brightness on scales going from sub-degree to a hundred square degrees. We observe modulations of about $60$% on scales of several degrees and decreasing for higher energies. The observed patchiness is stable over a period of two years, therefore excluding that…
Observations by the Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe (WMAP) satellite have identified an excess of microwave emission from the centre of the Milky Way. It has been suggested that this WMAP haze emission could potentially be synchrotron emission from relativistic electrons and positrons produced in the annihilations of one (or more) species of dark matter particles. In this paper we re-calculate the intensity and morphology of the WMAP haze using a multi-linear regression involving full-sky templates of the dominant forms of galactic foreground emission, using two different CMB sky signal e…
