Testing gamma-ray models of blazars in the extragalactic sky
Abstract
The global contribution of unresolved gamma-ray point sources to the extragalactic gamma-ray background has been recently measured down to gamma-ray fluxes lower than those reached with standard source detection techniques, and by employing the statistical properties of the observed gamma-ray counts. We investigate and exploit the complementarity of the information brought by the one-point statistics of photon counts (using more than 10 years of Fermi-LAT data) and by the recent measurement of the angular power spectrum of the unresolved gamma-ray background (based on 8 years of Fermi-LAT data). We determine, under the assumption that the source-count distribution of the brightest unresolved objects is dominated by blazars, their gamma-ray luminosity function and spectral energy distribution down to fluxes almost two orders of magnitude smaller than the threshold for detecting resolved sources. The different approaches provide consistent predictions for the gamma-ray luminosity function of blazars, and they show a significant complementarity.
Keywords
Cite
@article{arxiv.1912.01622,
title = {Testing gamma-ray models of blazars in the extragalactic sky},
author = {Silvia Manconi and Michael Korsmeier and Fiorenza Donato and Nicolao Fornengo and Marco Regis and Hannes Zechlin},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1912.01622},
year = {2020}
}
Comments
Matches the published version; extended discussion on detection efficiency, 4FGL fit improved, comments added. Main results and conclusions unchanged