- First Name:Jennifer
- Last Name:SiegalGaskins
- Working Group Presenter
- Title:Population Studies of the Unidentified EGRET Sources
- Presentation Type:Poster
- Presentation Work Group:Gamma Astronomy
- Abstract:The 3rd EGRET catalog contains a large number of unidentified sources.
This subset of objects is expected to include known gamma-ray emitters of
galactic origin such as pulsars and supernova remnants, in addition to an
extragalactic population of blazars. However, current data allows the
intriguing possibility that some of these objects may represent a new
class of yet undiscovered gamma-ray sources. Many theoretically-motivated
candidate emitters (e.g. annihilating dark matter particles) have been
suggested to account for these detections. We take a new approach to
determine to what extent this population is Galactic and to investigate
the nature of the Galactic and extragalactic components. By assuming that
galaxies similar to the Milky Way should host comparable populations of
objects, we constrain the allowed properties of new classes of gamma-ray
sources and evaluate the plausibility of various models using the EGRET
data set. In addition, we examine whether different subsets of the EGRET
unidentified sources are spectrally consistent with established and
proposed classes of gamma-ray emitters. Finally, we discuss the
additional constraints and new insights that GLAST will provide, and show
that GLAST will be able to distinguish between different models of source
populations.