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Source Count Distribution of Fermi LAT Gamma-Ray Blazars Using Novel Nonparametric Methods

High Energy Astrophysical Phenomena 2024-08-28 v1 High Energy Physics - Phenomenology

Abstract

We utilized a sample from the Fermi-LAT 14-year Source Catalog by adjusting the flux detection threshold, enabling us to derive the intrinsic source count distribution dN/dF25dN/dF_{25} of extragalactic blazars using nonparametric, unbinned methods developed by Efron and Petrosian and Lynden-Bell. Subsequently, we evaluated the contribution of blazars to the extragalactic gamma-ray background. Our findings are summarized as follows: (1) There is no significant correlation between flux and spectral index values among blazars and their subclasses FSRQs and BL Lacs. (2) The intrinsic differential distributions of flux values exhibit a broken-power-law form, with parameters that closely match previous findings. The intrinsic photon index distributions are well described by a Gaussian form for FSRQs and BL Lacs individually, while a dual-Gaussian model provides a more appropriate fit for blazars as a whole. (3) Blazars contribute 34.5\% to the extragalactic gamma-ray background and 16.8\% to the extragalactic diffuse gamma-ray background. When examined separately, FSRQs and BL Lacs contribute 19.6\% and 13\% to the extragalactic gamma-ray background, respectively.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2408.14877,
  title  = {Source Count Distribution of Fermi LAT Gamma-Ray Blazars Using Novel Nonparametric Methods},
  author = {Xuhang Yin and Houdun Zeng},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2408.14877},
  year   = {2024}
}

Comments

14 pages, 6 figures. Accepted for publication in Universe

R2 v1 2026-06-28T18:25:01.505Z