RSAA Colloquia / Seminars / Feast-of-Facts: Thursday, 17 May 2018, 11:00-12:00; Duffield Lecture Theatre


Chris Gordon

"Is the Galactic Bulge shining in gamma rays?"

Data from the Fermi Large Area Telescope indicates that there is an extended source of GeV gamma-ray photons coming from the Galactic Centre. Initially, it was thought that this could be due to self-annihilating dark matter. However, recent work shows that the spatial morphology better matches the shape of the Galactic bulge rather than a spherically symmetric shape that would be expected from a dark matter signal. I will discuss this result and also give details on the evidence that the source of the excess is due to an unresolved population of millisecond pulsars.