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Published August 2011 | Published
Journal Article Open

Anisotropies in the gamma-ray sky from millisecond pulsars

Abstract

Pulsars emerge in the Fermi era as a sizable population of gamma-ray sources. Millisecond pulsars (MSPs) constitute an older subpopulation whose sky distribution extends to high Galactic latitudes, and it has been suggested that unresolved members of this class may contribute a significant fraction of the measured large-scale isotropic gamma-ray background (IGRB). We investigate the possible energy-dependent contribution of unresolved MSPs to the anisotropy of the Fermi-measured IGRB. For observationally motivated MSP population models, we show that the preliminary Fermi anisotropy measurement places an interesting constraint on the abundance of MSPs in the Galaxy and the typical MSP flux, about an order of magnitude stronger than constraints on this population derived from the intensity of the IGRB alone. We also examine the possibility of an MSP component in the IGRB mimicking a dark matter signal in anisotropy-based searches, and conclude that the energy dependence of an anisotropy signature would distinguish MSPs from all but very light dark matter candidates.

Additional Information

© 2011 The Authors. Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society © 2011 RAS. Accepted 2011 March 8. Received 2011 February 28; in original form 2010 November 24. Article first published online: 27 Jun. 2011. We acknowledge Tim Linden, Kohta Murase, Marco Pierbattista and Todd Thompson for helpful discussions. This work was partially supported by NASA through the Fermi GI Program grant number NNX09AT74G. JMS-G was supported in part by NSF CAREER Grant PHY-0547102 (to John Beacom). RR and TPW are supported by DOE grant DE-FG02-91ER406. JMS-G, RR and TPW also acknowledge support from the Ohio State University Center for Cosmology and Astro-Particle Physics. VP acknowledges support for this work provided by NASA through Einstein Postdoctoral Fellowship grant number PF8-90060 awarded by the Chandra X-ray Center, which is operated by the Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory for NASA under contract NAS8-03060. SP acknowledges support from the National Science Foundation, award PHY-0757911-001, and from an Outstanding Junior Investigator Award from the Department of Energy, DE-FG02-04ER41286.

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