Dark matter constraints from dwarf galaxies: a data-driven analysis

Understand

Dwarf galaxies represent a powerful probe of annihilating dark matter particle models, with gamma-ray data setting some of the best bounds available.

• A major issue in improving over existing constraints consists in the limited knowledge of the astrophysical background (mostly diffuse photons, but also unresolved sources).
• Perhaps more worrisome, several approaches in the literature suffer of the difficulty of assessing the systematic error due to background mis-modelling.
• Here we propose a data-driven method to estimate the background at the dwarf position and its uncertainty, relying on an appropriate use of the whole-sky data, via an optimisation procedure of the interpolation weights.