DECIPHERING CONTRIBUTIONS TO THE EXTRAGALACTIC GAMMA-RAY BACKGROUND FROM 2 GeV TO 2 TeV
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Lisanti-2016-DECIPHERING CONTRIBUTIONS TO THE.pdf
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Author(s)
Lisanti, Mariangela
Mishra-Sharma, Siddharth
Necib, Lina
Safdi, Benjamin Ryan
Date Issued
November 2016
Journal
Astrophysical Journal
Publisher
IOP Publishing
Citation
Lisanti, Mariangela; Mishra-Sharma, Siddharth; Necib, Lina and Safdi, Benjamin R. “DECIPHERING CONTRIBUTIONS TO THE EXTRAGALACTIC GAMMA-RAY BACKGROUND FROM 2 GeV TO 2 TeV.” The Astrophysical Journal 832, no. 2 (November 2016): 117 © 2016 The American Astronomical Society
Version
Final published version
Abstract
Astrophysical sources outside the Milky Way, such as active galactic nuclei and star-forming galaxies, leave their imprint on the gamma-ray sky as nearly isotropic emission referred to as the extragalactic gamma-ray background (EGB). While the brightest of these sources may be individually resolved, their fainter counterparts contribute diffusely. In this work, we use a recently developed analysis method, called the Non-Poissonian Template Fit, on up to 93 months of publicly available data from the Fermi Large Area Telescope to determine the properties of the point sources (PSs) that comprise the EGB. This analysis takes advantage of photon-count statistics to probe the aggregate properties of these source populations below the sensitivity threshold of published catalogs. We measure the source-count distributions and PS intensities, as a function of energy, from ~2 GeV to 2 TeV. We find that the EGB is dominated by PSs, likely blazars, in all seven energy sub-bins considered. These results have implications for the interpretation of IceCube's PeV neutrinos, which may originate from sources that contribute to the non-blazar component of the EGB. Additionally, we comment on implications for future TeV observatories such as the Cherenkov Telescope Array. We provide sky maps showing locations most likely to contain these new sources at both low (≲50 GeV) and high (≳50 GeV) energies for use in future observations and cross-correlation studies.
MIT Department
Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Center for Theoretical Physics
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Article is made available in accordance with the publisher's policy and may be subject to US copyright law. Please refer to the publisher's site for terms of use.
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DOI of Published Version
https://doi.org/10.3847/0004-637x/832/2/117
