Dark Matter Strikes Back at the Galactic Center

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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.