Known Radio Pulsars Do Not Contribute to the Galactic Center Gamma-Ray Excess

Abstract

Observations using the Fermi Large Area Telescope (Fermi-LAT) have found a significant gamma-ray excess surrounding the center of the Milky Way (GC). One possible interpretation of this excess invokes gamma-ray emission from an undiscovered population of either young or recycled pulsars densely clustered throughout the inner kiloparsec of the Milky Way. While these systems, by construction, have individual fluxes that lie below the point source sensitivity of the Fermi-LAT, they may already be observed in multiwavelength observations. Notably the Australia Telescope National Facility (ATNF) catalog of radio pulsars includes 270 sources observed in the inner 10 degrees around the GC. We calculate the gamma-ray emission observed from these 270 sources and obtain three key results: (1) point source searches in the GC region produce a plethora of highly significant gamma-ray "hotspots", compared to searches far from the Galactic plane, (2) there is no statistical correlation between the positions of these gamma-ray hotspots and the locations of ATNF pulsars, and (3) the spectrum of the most statistically significant gamma-ray hotspots is substantially softer than the spectrum of the GC gamma-ray excess. These results place strong constraints on models where young pulsars produce the majority of the gamma-ray excess, and disfavor some models where millisecond pulsars produce the gamma-ray excess.

11 pages, 5 figures

References in corpus (16)

• Background model systematics for the Fermi GeV excess
• Strong support for the millisecond pulsar origin of the Galactic center GeV excess
• Evidence for Unresolved Gamma-Ray Point Sources in the Inner Galaxy
• Simplified Dark Matter Models for the Galactic Center Gamma-Ray Excess
• Cosmic Ray Protons in the Inner Galaxy and the Galactic Center Gamma-Ray Excess
• Hidden On-Shell Mediators for the Galactic Center Gamma-Ray Excess
• Disrupted Globular Clusters Can Explain the Galactic Center Gamma Ray Excess
• Galactic Center gamma-ray "excess" from an active past of the Galactic Centre?
• Millisecond pulsars and the Galactic Center gamma-ray excess: the importance of luminosity function and secondary emission
• Flavored Dark Matter and the Galactic Center Gamma-Ray Excess
• The Galactic Center GeV Excess from a Series of Leptonic Cosmic-Ray Outbursts
• The Effective Hooperon
• The Galactic Center Excess from the Bottom Up
• On The Gamma-Ray Emission From Reticulum II and Other Dwarf Galaxies
• Testing the millisecond pulsar scenario of the Galactic center gamma-ray excess with very high energy gamma-rays
• Radio-quiet and radio-loud pulsars: similar in Gamma-rays but different in X-rays

Cited by in corpus (17)

• A review of indirect searches for particle dark matter
• The High-Energy Tail of the Galactic Center Gamma-Ray Excess
• The Gamma-Ray Luminosity Function of Millisecond Pulsars and Implications for the GeV Excess
• The Gamma-Ray Pulsar Population of Globular Clusters: Implications for the GeV Excess
• Low Mass X-Ray Binaries in the Inner Galaxy: Implications for Millisecond Pulsars and the GeV Excess
• Model-independent analysis of the DAMPE excess
• Star-Forming Galaxies Significantly Contribute to the Isotropic Gamma-Ray Background
• The $\text{Fermi}$-LAT gamma-ray excess at the Galactic Center in the singlet-doublet fermion dark matter model
• p-wave Annihilating Dark Matter from a Decaying Predecessor and the Galactic Center Excess
• The Spatial Morphology of the Secondary Emission in the Galactic Center Gamma-Ray Excess
• Wavelet-Based Techniques for the Gamma-Ray Sky
• Dark matter implications of the WMAP-Planck Haze
• Interpretation of the gamma-ray excess and AMS-02 antiprotons: Velocity dependent dark matter annihilations
• The Galactic Center Excess from Z3 Scalar Semi-Annihilations
• Constraining Dwarf Spheroidal Dark Matter Halos With The Galactic Center Excess
• Dark matter, extra-terrestrial gamma-rays and the MSSM: a viability study
• Dark matter properties implied by gamma ray interstellar emission models