Resolving Dark Matter Subhalos With Future Sub-GeV Gamma-Ray Telescopes

Understand

Annihilating dark matter particles in nearby subhalos could generate potentially observable fluxes of gamma rays, unaccompanied by emission at other wavelengths.

• Furthermore, this gamma-ray emission is expected to be spatially extended, providing us with a powerful way to discriminate dark matter subhalos from other astrophysical gamma-ray sources.
• Fermi has detected two dark matter subhalo candidates which exhibit a statistically significant degree of spatial extension (3FGL J2212.5+0703 and 3FGL J1924.8-1034).
• It has been argued that the most likely non-dark matter interpretation of these observations is that they are each in fact multiple nearby point sources, too close to one another on the sky to be individually resolved.