Volume 309, Numbers 1-4, 81-87, DOI: 10.1007/s10509-007-9456-1

Unidentified EGRET sources and the extragalactic gamma-ray background

Vasiliki Pavlidou, Jennifer M. Siegal-Gaskins, Carolyn Brown, Brian D. Fields and Angela V. Olinto

From the issue entitled "The Multi-Messenger Approach to High-Energy Gamma-Ray Sources: Third Workshop on the Nature of Unidentified High-Energy Sources"

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Abstract

The large majority of EGRET point sources remain to this day without an identified low-energy counterpart. Whatever the nature of the EGRET unidentified sources, faint unresolved objects of the same class must have a contribution to the diffuse gamma-ray background: if most unidentified objects are extragalactic, faint unresolved sources of the same class contribute to the background, as a distinct extragalactic population; on the other hand, if most unidentified sources are Galactic, their counterparts in external galaxies will contribute to the unresolved emission from these systems. Understanding this component of the gamma-ray background, along with other guaranteed contributions from known sources, is essential in any attempt to use gamma-ray observations to constrain exotic high-energy physics. Here, we follow an empirical approach to estimate whether a potential contribution of unidentified sources to the extragalactic gamma-ray background is likely to be important, and we find that it is. Additionally, we comment on how the anticipated GLAST measurement of the diffuse gamma-ray background will change, depending on the nature of the majority of these sources.

Keywords  Gamma rays: observations - Gamma-ray sources: astronomical - Radiation sources: unidentified

PACS  95.85.Pw - 98.70.Rz - 98.70.-f


This work was supported by the Kavli Institute for Cosmological Physics through the grant NSF PHY-0114422 and by DOE grant DE-FG0291-ER40606 at the University of Chicago.

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