# 3FHL: The Third Catalog of Hard Fermi-LAT Sources

## TL;DR

The 3FHL catalog presents 1556 high-energy gamma-ray sources detected by Fermi-LAT over 7 years, with improved sensitivity, revealing new sources, spectral features, and variability, crucial for future gamma-ray observations.

## Contribution

This work provides the third and most comprehensive catalog of hard Fermi-LAT sources, with significant improvements in detection sensitivity and source characterization over previous catalogs.

## Key findings

- 214 new gamma-ray sources identified.
- Spectral curvature detected in 32 sources.
- Flux variability observed in 163 sources.

## Abstract

We present a catalog of sources detected above 10 GeV by the Fermi Large Area Telescope (LAT) in the first 7 years of data using the Pass 8 event-level analysis. This is the Third Catalog of Hard Fermi-LAT Sources (3FHL), containing 1556 objects characterized in the 10 GeV - 2 TeV energy range. The sensitivity and angular resolution are improved by factors of 3 and 2 relative to the previous LAT catalog at the same energies (1FHL). The vast majority of detected sources (79%) are associated with extragalactic counterparts at other wavelengths, including 16 sources located at very high redshift ($z>2$). Eight percent of the sources have Galactic counterparts and 13% are unassociated (or associated with a source of unknown nature). The high-latitude sky and the Galactic plane are observed with a flux sensitivity of 4.4 to 9.5$\times 10^{-11}$ ph cm$^{-2}$ s$^{-1}$, respectively (this is approximately 0.5% and 1% of the Crab Nebula flux above 10 GeV). The catalog includes 214 new $\gamma$-ray sources. The substantial increase in the number of photons (more than 4 times relative to 1FHL and 10 times to 2FHL) also allows us to measure significant spectral curvature for 32 sources and find flux variability for 163 of them. Furthermore, we estimate that for the same flux limit of $10^{-12}$ erg cm$^{-2}$ s$^{-1}$, the energy range above 10 GeV has twice as many sources as above 50 GeV, highlighting the importance, for future Cherenkov telescopes, of lowering the energy threshold as much as possible.