Bow Ties in the Sky. II. Searching for Gamma-Ray Halos in the Fermi Sky Using Anisotropy

Abstract

Many-degree-scale gamma-ray halos are expected to surround extragalactic high-energy gamma-ray sources. These arise from the inverse Compton emission of an intergalactic population of relativistic electron/positron pairs generated by the annihilation of ≳100 GeV gamma rays on the extragalactic background light. These are typically anisotropic due to the jetted structure from which they originate (in the case of radio galaxies) or are oriented perpendicular to a large-scale intergalactic magnetic field (for blazar geometries). Here, we propose a novel method for detecting these inverse Compton gamma-ray halos based on this anisotropic structure that is centered on the active galactic nucleus (AGN). By marginalizing over the radial distribution of halo photons, we demonstrate that the angular power spectrum shows a characteristic sawtooth pattern with a dominant dipolar power and elevated even multipoles. Specifically, we show that by stacking those angular power spectra instead of images, it is possible to robustly detect gamma-ray halos with existing Fermi Large Area Telescope (LAT) observations for a broad class of intergalactic magnetic fields. Importantly, by testing a large number of systematics, our suggested power spectrum statistics appears to be robust and unbiased with respect to systematic uncertainties within the LAT instrumental response and associated with contaminating astronomical sources.

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