On the morphology of the gamma-ray galactic centre excess

• Published in: Monthly notices of the Royal Astronomical Society. Letters Vol. 522; no. 1; pp. L21 - L25
• Main Authors: McDermott, Samuel D, Zhong, Yi-Ming, Cholis, Ilias
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: United States Royal Astronomical Society 01.06.2023
• Subjects: ASTRONOMY AND ASTROPHYSICS; dark matter; gamma-rays: diffuse background; methods: data analysis; PHYSICS OF ELEMENTARY PARTICLES AND FIELDS
• ISSN: 1745-3925; 1745-3933
• DOI: 10.1093/mnrasl/slad035

The characteristics of the galactic centre excess (GCE) emission observed in gamma-ray energies – especially the morphology of the GCE – remain a hotly debated subject. The manner in which the dominant diffuse gamma-ray background is modelled has been claimed to have a determining effect on the preferred morphology. In this work, we compare two distinct approaches to the galactic diffuse gamma-ray emission background: the first approach models this emission through templates calculated from a sequence of well-defined astrophysical assumptions, while the second approach divides surrogates for the background gamma-ray emission into cylindrical galactocentric rings with free independent normalizations. At the latitudes that we focus on, we find that the former approach works better, and that the overall best fit is obtained for an astrophysically motivated fit when the GCE follows the morphology expected of dark matter annihilation. Quantitatively, the improvement compared with the best ring-based fits is roughly 6500 in the χ2 and roughly 4000 in the log of the Bayesian evidence.