# Dark Matter Strikes Back at the Galactic Center

## TL;DR

This paper investigates how unmodeled astrophysical sources can bias the interpretation of the Galactic Center Excess, revealing that dark matter signals might be underestimated due to modeling limitations.

## Contribution

It demonstrates that unmodeled sources can cause misattribution of dark matter signals to point sources in non-Poissonian template fitting analyses.

## Key findings

- Unmodeled sources in simulations can mislead the identification of dark matter signals.
- Real data shows effects consistent with source mis-modeling, affecting dark matter attribution.
- Dark matter may still be the dominant contributor to the Galactic Center Excess.

## Abstract

Statistical evidence has previously suggested that the Galactic Center GeV Excess (GCE) originates largely from point sources, and not from annihilating dark matter. We examine the impact of unmodeled source populations on identifying the true origin of the GCE using non-Poissonian template fitting (NPTF) methods. In a proof-of-principle example with simulated data, we discover that unmodeled sources in the Fermi Bubbles can lead to a dark matter signal being misattributed to point sources by the NPTF. We discover striking behavior consistent with a mismodeling effect in the real Fermi data, finding that large artificial injected dark matter signals are completely misattributed to point sources. Consequently, we conclude that dark matter may provide a dominant contribution to the GCE after all.