Abstract
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, finding that large artificial injected dark matter signals are completely misattributed to point sources. Consequently, we conclude that dark matter may provide a dominant contribution to the GCE after all.
- Received 22 May 2019
- Revised 29 September 2019
DOI:https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevLett.123.241101
© 2019 American Physical Society
Physics Subject Headings (PhySH)
Synopsis
New Hope for Milky Way Dark Matter
Published 11 December 2019
The so-called gamma-ray excess that radiates from the core of our Galaxy might be from dark matter after all.
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