English

Source-count Distribution of Gamma-Ray Blazars

High Energy Astrophysical Phenomena 2020-06-09 v1

Abstract

With ten years of operation and an exceptional dataset, the Fermi-Large Area Telescope allows us to unveil the detailed composition of the extragalactic γ\gamma-ray sky above 100MeV\rm 100\,MeV. In this paper, we derive the intrinsic source-count distribution (logN-logS) of extragalactic sources (i.e., blazars) at b>20|b|>20^{\circ} via the efficiency correction method. With this approach, we are able to measure the distribution down to a photon flux of 1010\sim10^{-10}phcm2s1{\rm \, ph \,\, cm^{-2} \, s^{-1}} and to an energy flux of 1012\sim10^{-12}ergcm2s1{\rm \, erg \,\, cm^{-2} \, s^{-1}}. In both cases the logN-logS becomes flatter at low fluxes. Moreover, we show that this logN-logS is representative of the blazar population (assuming the majority of unassociated sources are blazars) and allows us to constrain its evolution quite effectively. Among recently proposed evolutionary models, we find that the Pure Density Evolution (PDE) model best describes the evolutionary properties of the blazar population and that their integrated emission accounts for 505+10%\sim 50^{+10}_{-5}\% of the total extragalactic \gm-ray background.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2006.04703,
  title  = {Source-count Distribution of Gamma-Ray Blazars},
  author = {Lea Marcotulli and Mattia Di Mauro and Marco Ajello},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2006.04703},
  year   = {2020}
}

Comments

16 pages, 9 figures, 5 tables; published in the Astrophysical Journal

R2 v1 2026-06-23T16:09:05.595Z