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Wednesday, June 2, 2021

Fermi-LAT Hasn't Seen Dark Matter Annihilation

The Fermi-LAT team has repeatedly claimed that the cosmic rays that it has seen are a signal of dark matter annihilation. These claims are wrong and have a far more prosaic explanation that does not involve new physics.
Gamma-ray data from the Fermi-Large Area Telescope reveal an unexplained, apparently diffuse, signal from the Galactic bulge. The origin of this "Galactic Center Excess" (GCE) has been debated with proposed sources prominently including self-annihilating dark matter and a hitherto undetected population of millisecond pulsars (MSPs). 
We use a binary population synthesis forward model to demonstrate that an MSP population arising from the accretion induced collapse of O-Ne white dwarfs in Galactic bulge binaries can naturally explain the GCE. Synchrotron emission from MSP-launched cosmic ray electrons and positrons seems also to explain the mysterious "haze" of hard-spectrum, non-thermal microwave emission from the inner Galaxy detected in WMAP and Planck data.

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