Related papers: Characterizing the Expected Behavior of Non-Poisso…
We present NPTFit, an open-source code package, written in python and cython, for performing non-Poissonian template fits (NPTFs). The NPTF is a recently-developed statistical procedure for characterizing the contribution of unresolved…
The Fermi Large Area Telescope has observed an excess of ~GeV energy gamma rays from the center of the Milky Way, which may arise from near-thermal dark matter annihilation. Firmly establishing the dark matter origin for this excess is…
The Galactic Center Excess (GCE) of GeV gamma rays can be explained as a signal of annihilating dark matter or of emission from unresolved astrophysical sources, such as millisecond pulsars. Evidence for the latter is provided by a…
We combine adaptive template fitting and pixel count statistics in order to assess the nature of the Galactic center excess in Fermi-LAT data. We reconstruct the flux distribution of point sources well below the Fermi-LAT detection…
The identification and description of point sources is one of the oldest problems in astronomy; yet, even today the correct statistical treatment for point sources remains one of the field's hardest problems. For dim or crowded sources,…
The contribution of unresolved sources to the diffuse gamma-ray background could produce anisotropies in this emission on small angular scales. Recent studies have considered the angular power spectrum and other anisotropy metrics as tools…
Detection of point sources in images is a fundamental operation in astrophysics, and is crucial for constraining population models of the underlying point sources or characterizing the background emission. Standard techniques fall short in…
An analytic relation between the statistics of photons in pixels and the number counts of multi-photon point sources is used to constrain the distribution of gamma-ray point sources below the Fermi detection limit at energies above 1 GeV…
Detection of templates (e.g., sources) embedded in low-number count Poisson noise is a common problem in astrophysics. Examples include source detection in X-ray images, gamma-rays, UV, neutrinos, and search for clusters of galaxies and…
Photon counts statistics have recently been proven to provide a sensitive observable for characterizing gamma-ray source populations and for measuring the composition of the gamma-ray sky. In this work, we generalize the use of the standard…
We propose a novel statistical method to extend Fermi-LAT catalogues of high-latitude $\gamma$-ray sources below their nominal threshold. To do so, we rely on a recent determination of the differential source-count distribution of…
The Fermi-LAT collaboration has recently released a new point source catalog, referred to as 4FGL. For the first time, we perform a template fit using information from this new catalog and find that the Galactic center excess is still…
The source-count distribution as a function of their flux, dN/dS, is one of the main quantities characterizing gamma-ray source populations. We employ statistical properties of the Fermi Large Area Telescope (LAT) photon counts map to…
We describe a simple test of the spatial uniformity of an ensemble of discrete events. Given an estimate for the point source luminosity function and an instrumental point spread function (PSF), a robust upper bound on the fractional point…
The Fermi-LAT data appear to have an excess of gamma rays from the inner 150 pc of the Galactic Center. The main explanations proposed for this are: an unresolved population of millisecond pulsars (MSPs), dark matter (DM) annihilation, and…
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…
Statistical properties of photon count maps have recently been proven as a new tool to study the composition of the gamma-ray sky with high precision. We employ the 1-point probability distribution function of 6 years of Fermi-LAT data to…
We report on a detailed spectral characterization of the non-thermal X-ray emission for a large sample of gamma-ray pulsars in the second Fermi-LAT catalogue. We outline the criteria adopted for the selection of our sample, its…
Sensitivity of searches for extended emission around gamma-ray sources is naturally limited by the precision of the knowledge of the Point Spread Function (PSF) of gamma-ray telescopes. Inaccuracies in the PSF models of the Fermi Large Area…
Given a set of images, whose pixel values can be considered as the components of a vector, it is interesting to estimate the modulus of such a vector in some localised areas corresponding to a compact signal. For instance, the…