Dark matter vs. Pulsars: Catching the impostor

Understand

Evidence of excess GeV emission nearly coinciding with the Galactic Centre has been interpreted as a possible signature of annihilating dark matter.

• In this paper, we argue that it seems too early to discard pulsars as a viable explanation for the observed excess.
• On the heels of the recently released Second Fermi LAT Pulsar Catalogue (2FPC), it is still possible that a population of hard (Gamma < 1) millisecond pulsars (MSPs) either endemic to the innermost region or part of a larger nascent collection of hard MSPs that appears to be emerging in the 2FPC could explain the GeV excess near the Galactic Centre.