Diffuse gamma-ray emission from galactic pulsars

TL;DR

This study assesses the contribution of unresolved millisecond pulsars to the diffuse gamma-ray background, finding their impact negligible at high latitudes but potentially significant near the galactic plane.

Contribution

It models the spatial distribution and emission of MSPs to quantify their contribution to gamma-ray background and anisotropy, providing new constraints on their role.

Findings

Unresolved MSPs contribute at most 0.9% to the high-latitude diffuse emission.

The anisotropy from unresolved MSPs is much smaller than Fermi-LAT measurements.

MSPs are negligible contributors to high-latitude gamma-ray background but significant at low latitudes.

Abstract

Millisecond Pulsars are second most abundant source population discovered by the Fermi-LAT. They might contribute non-negligibly to the diffuse emission measured at high latitudes by Fermi-LAT, the IDGRB. Gamma-ray sources also contribute to the anisotropy of the IDGRB measured on small scales by Fermi-LAT. We aim to assess the contribution of the unresolved counterpart of the detected MSPs population to the IDGRB and the maximal fraction of the measured anisotropy produced by this source class. We model the MSPs spatial distribution in the Galaxy and the gamma-ray emission parameters by considering radio and gamma-ray observational constraints. By simulating a large number of MSPs populations, we compute the average diffuse emission and the anisotropy 1-sigma upper limit. The emission from unresolved MSPs at 2 GeV, where the peak of the spectrum is located, is at most 0.9% of the measured IDGRB above 10 degrees in latitude. The 1-sigma upper limit on the angular power for unresolved MSP sources turns out to be about a factor of 60 smaller than Fermi-LAT measurements above 30 degrees. Our results indicate that this galactic source class represents a negligible contributor to the high-latitude gamma-ray sky and confirm that most of the intensity and geometrical properties of the measured diffuse emission are imputable to other extragalactic source classes. Nevertheless, given the MSP distribution, we expect them to contribute significantly to the gamma-ray diffuse emission at low latitudes. Since, along the galactic disk, the population of young Pulsars overcomes in number the one of MSPs, we compute the gamma-ray emission from the whole population of unresolved Pulsars in two low-latitude regions: the inner Galaxy and the galactic center.