SEARCHING FOR DARK MATTER ANNIHILATION IN RECENTLY DISCOVERED MILKY WAY SATELLITES WITH FERMI-LAT Academic Article uri icon

abstract

  • ABSTRACT We search for excess -ray emission coincident with the positions of confirmed and candidate Milky Way satellite galaxies using six years of data from the Fermi Large Area Telescope (LAT). Our sample of 45 stellar systems includes 28 kinematically confirmed dark-matter-dominated dwarf spheroidal galaxies (dSphs) and 17 recently discovered systems that have photometric characteristics consistent with the population of known dSphs. For each of these targets, the relative predicted -ray flux due to dark matter annihilation is taken from kinematic analysis if available, and estimated from a distance-based scaling relation otherwise, assuming that the stellar systems are DM-dominated dSphs. LAT data coincident with four of the newly discovered targets show a slight preference (each 2 local) for -ray emission in excess of the background. However, the ensemble of derived -ray flux upper limits for individual targets is consistent with the expectation from analyzing random blank-sky regions, and a combined analysis of the population of stellar systems yields no globally significant excess (global significance ). Our analysis has increased sensitivity compared to the analysis of 15 confirmed dSphs by Ackermann et al. The observed constraints on the DM annihilation cross section are statistically consistent with the background expectation, improving by a factor of 2 for large DM masses ( and ) and weakening by a factor of1.5 at lower masses relative to previously observed limits.

published proceedings

  • ASTROPHYSICAL JOURNAL

altmetric score

  • 26.91

author list (cited authors)

  • Albert, A., Anderson, B., Bechtol, K., Drlica-Wagner, A., Meyer, M., Sanchez-Conde, M., ... Wechsler, R. H.

citation count

  • 366

complete list of authors

  • Albert, A||Anderson, B||Bechtol, K||Drlica-Wagner, A||Meyer, M||Sanchez-Conde, M||Strigari, L||Wood, M||Abbott, TMC||Abdalla, FB||Benoit-Levy, A||Bernstein, GM||Bernstein, RA||Bertin, E||Brooks, D||Burke, DL||Rosell, A Carnero||Kind, M Carrasco||Carretero, J||Crocce, M||Cunha, CE||D'Andrea, CB||da Costa, LN||Desai, S||Diehl, HT||Dietrich, JP||Doel, P||Eifler, TF||Evrard, AE||Fausti Neto, A||Finley, DA||Flaugher, B||Fosalba, P||Frieman, J||Gerdes, DW||Goldstein, DA||Gruen, D||Gruendl, RA||Honscheid, K||James, DJ||Kent, S||Kuehn, K||Kuropatkin, N||Lahav, O||Li, TS||Maia, MAG||March, M||Marshall, JL||Martini, P||Miller, CJ||Miquel, R||Neilsen, E||Nord, B||Ogando, R||Plazas, AA||Reil, K||Romer, AK||Rykoff, ES||Sanchez, E||Santiago, B||Schubnell, M||Sevilla-Noarbe, I||Smith, RC||Soares-Santos, M||Sobreira, F||Suchyta, E||Swanson, MEC||Tarle, G||Vikram, V||Walker, AR||Wechsler, RH

publication date

  • January 2017