Dark matter versus pulsars: catching the impostor

Author/Creator

Author/Creator ORCID

Date

2013-10-08

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Citation of Original Publication

N. Mirabal, Dark matter versus pulsars: catching the impostor, Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society, Volume 436, Issue 3, 11 December 2013, Pages 2461–2464, https://doi.org/10.1093/mnras/stt1740

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This article has been accepted for publication in Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the Royal Astronomical Society.

Subjects

Abstract

Evidence of excess GeV emission nearly coinciding with the Galactic Centre has been interpreted as a possible signature of annihilating dark matter. In this paper, we argue that it seems too early to discard pulsars as a viable explanation for the observed excess. On the heels of the recently released Second Fermi LAT Pulsar Catalogue (2FPC), it is still possible that a population of hard (Γ < 1) millisecond pulsars (MSPs) either endemic to the innermost region or part of a larger nascent collection of hard MSPs that appears to be emerging in the 2FPC could explain the GeV excess near the Galactic Centre.