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Strong Evidence that the Galactic Bulge is Shining in Gamma Rays

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arxiv 1901.03822 v3 pith:XW64IJ4C submitted 2019-01-12 astro-ph.HE astro-ph.COastro-ph.GAhep-ph

classification astro-ph.HEastro-ph.COastro-ph.GAhep-ph
keywords bulgegalactictextitevidenceformationexcessscenariodata
verification ladder T0 review T1 audit T2 compute T3 formal
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abstract

There is growing evidence that the Galactic Center Excess identified in the $\textit{Fermi}$-LAT gamma-ray data arises from a population of faint astrophysical sources. We provide compelling supporting evidence by showing that the morphology of the excess traces the stellar over-density of the Galactic bulge. By adopting a template of the bulge stars obtained from a triaxial 3D fit to the diffuse near-infrared emission, we show that it is detected at high significance. The significance deteriorates when either the position or the orientation of the template is artificially shifted, supporting the correlation of the gamma-ray data with the Galactic bulge. In deriving these results, we have used more sophisticated templates at low-latitudes for the $\textit{Fermi}$ bubbles compared to previous work and the three-dimensional Inverse Compton (IC) maps recently released by the ${\tt GALPROP}$ team. Our results provide strong constraints on Millisecond Pulsar (MSP) formation scenarios proposed to explain the excess. We find that an $\textit{admixture formation}$ scenario, in which some of the relevant binaries are $\textit{primordial}$ and the rest are formed $\textit{dynamically}$, is preferred over a primordial-only formation scenario at $7.6\sigma$ confidence level. Our detailed morphological analysis also disfavors models of the disrupted globular clusters scenario that predict a spherically symmetric distribution of MSPs in the Galactic bulge. For the first time, we report evidence of a high energy tail in the nuclear bulge spectrum that could be the result of IC emission from electrons and positrons injected by a population of MSPs and star formation activity from the same site.

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Forward citations

Cited by 7 Pith papers

Reviewed papers in the Pith corpus that reference this work. Sorted by Pith novelty score.

  1. Producing the GeV Galactic Center Excess via Cosmic Ray-Dark Matter Scattering

    hep-ph 2026-05 unverdicted novelty 7.0 of 10

    Cosmic ray protons scattering off dark matter produce the Galactic Center gamma-ray excess through inelastic up-scattering followed by decay or direct elastic 2-to-3 photon production.

  2. High-dimensional inference for the $\gamma$-ray sky with differentiable programming

    astro-ph.HE 2026-04 unverdicted novelty 7.0 of 10

    A differentiable forward model and likelihood enable probabilistic inference over many spatial morphologies for the Galactic Center gamma-ray Excess using variational methods on GPUs.

  3. High-dimensional inference for the $\gamma$-ray sky with differentiable programming

    astro-ph.HE 2026-04 unverdicted novelty 6.0 of 10

    A differentiable forward model and likelihood enable fully probabilistic, high-dimensional inference over continuum morphologies of the Galactic Center gamma-ray Excess.

  4. Galactic Center gamma-ray excess from a generic triaxial halo

    astro-ph.HE 2026-02 conditional novelty 6.0 of 10

    Fermi-LAT fits show the Galactic Center gamma-ray excess keeps its spectrum and cuspiness under triaxial/tilted dark matter halo templates, but its morphology prefers a flipped-tilt halo and disfavors a stellar-halo profile.

  5. Stellar-like Galactic center excess challenges particle dark matter

    hep-ph 2025-11 conditional novelty 6.0 of 10

    A mixed stellar-bulge and dark-matter fit to Fermi-LAT Galactic Center data yields upper limits on the annihilation cross section that reach the thermal relic line for masses ≲300 GeV under a contracted NFW halo profile.

  6. Testing Viability of Benchmark Dark Matter Models for the Galactic Center Excess

    hep-ph 2025-09 unverdicted novelty 4.0 of 10

    Updated constraints on two simplified dark matter models for the Galactic Center Excess leave unconstrained parameter space after applying recent multi-experiment data.

  7. Fermi-LAT Galactic Center Excess morphology of dark matter in simulations of the Milky Way galaxy

    astro-ph.HE 2025-08 reject novelty 4.0 of 10

    The manuscript body is a different paper (b → c semileptonic sum rules) and contains none of the claimed dark matter gamma-ray morphology analysis, so the abstract's prediction is unsupported.

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