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Dark Matter Annihilation in The Galactic Center As Seen by the Fermi Gamma Ray Space Telescope

7 Pith papers cite this work. Polarity classification is still indexing.

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abstract

We analyze the first two years of data from the Fermi Gamma Ray Space Telescope from the direction of the inner 10 degrees around the Galactic Center with the intention of constraining, or finding evidence of, annihilating dark matter. We find that the morphology and spectrum of the emission between 1.25 degrees and 10 degrees from the Galactic Center is well described by a the processes of decaying pions produced in cosmic ray collisions with gas, and the inverse Compton scattering of cosmic ray electrons in both the disk and bulge of the Inner Galaxy, along with gamma rays from known points sources in the region. The observed spectrum and morphology of the emission within approximately 1.25 degrees (~175 parsecs) of the Galactic Center, in contrast, departs from the expectations for by these processes. Instead, we find an additional component of gamma ray emission that is highly concentrated around the Galactic Center. The observed morphology of this component is consistent with that predicted from annihilating dark matter with a cusped (and possibly adiabatically contracted) halo distribution (density proportional to r^{-gamma}, with gamma=1.18 to 1.33). The observed spectrum of this component, which peaks at energies between 1-4 GeV (in E^2 units), can be well fit by a 7-10 GeV dark matter particle annihilating primarily to tau leptons with a cross section in the range of 4.6 x 10^-27 to 5.3 x 10^-26 cm^3/s, depending on how the dark matter distribution is normalized. We also discuss other sources for this emission, including the possibility that much of it originates from the Milky Way's supermassive black hole.

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representative citing papers

WIMP-like Dark Matter Without Thermalization At Freeze-Out

hep-ph · 2026-05-19 · unverdicted · novelty 7.0

Hidden-sector dark matter achieves standard thermal relic abundance via early decoupling with temperature-matched freeze-out, enabling WIMP-like cross sections without late-time thermalization.

A Precise Measurement of the Fermi-LAT Galactic Center Excess Morphology and Spectrum

astro-ph.HE · 2026-05-21 · unverdicted · novelty 5.0

Refined Fermi-LAT analysis finds the Galactic Center Excess has a centrally concentrated spherical morphology consistent with generalized Navarro-Frenk-White inner slope ~1.15, significant across interstellar emission models, with spectrum peaking at a few GeV and upper limits above tens of GeV.

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