Galactic Center gamma-ray ``excess'' from an active past of the Galactic Centre?

Abstract

Several groups have recently claimed evidence for an unaccounted gamma-ray excess over the diffuse backgrounds at few GeV in the Fermi-LAT data in a region around the Galactic Center, consistent with a dark matter annihilation origin. We demonstrate that the main spectral and angular features of this excess can be reproduced if they are mostly due to inverse Compton emission from high-energy electrons injected in a burst event of ∼ 1052÷1053 erg roughly \U0001d4aa(106) years ago. We consider this example as a proof of principle that time-dependent phenomena need to be understood and accounted for—together with detailed diffuse foregrounds and unaccounted ``steady state'' astrophysical sources—before any robust inference can be made about dark matter signals at the Galactic Center. In addition, we point out that the timescale suggested by our study, which controls both the energy cutoff and the angular extension of the signal, intriguingly matches (together with the energy budget) what is indirectly inferred by other evidences suggesting a very active Galactic Center in the past, for instance related to intense star formation and accretion phenomena.