The isotropic $γ$-ray emission above 100 GeV: where do very high energy $γ$ rays come from?

Raniere de Menezes, Raffaele D'Abrusco, Francesco Massaro, Sara Buson

Published 2022-06-08Version 1

Astrophysical sources of very high energy (VHE; $>100$ GeV) $\gamma$ rays are rare, since GeV and TeV photons can be only emitted in extreme circumstances involving interactions of relativistic particles with local radiation and magnetic fields. In the context of the Fermi Large Area Telescope (LAT), only a few sources are known to be VHE emitters, where the largest fraction belongs to the rarest class of active galactic nuclei: the blazars. In this work, we explore Fermi-LAT data for energies $>100$ GeV and Galactic latitudes $b > |50^{\circ}|$ in order to probe the origin of the extragalactic isotropic $\gamma$-ray emission. Since the production of such VHE photons requires very specific astrophysical conditions, we would expect that the majority of the VHE photons from the isotropic $\gamma$-ray emission originate from blazars or other extreme objects like star-forming galaxies, $\gamma$-ray bursts, and radio galaxies, and that the detection of a single VHE photon at the adopted Galactic latitudes would be enough to unambiguously trace the presence of such a counterpart. Our results suggest that blazars are, by far, the dominant class of source above 100 GeV, although they account for only $22.8^{+4.5}_{-4.1}\%$ of the extragalactic VHE photons. The remaining $77^{+4.1}_{-4.5}\%$ of the VHE photons still have an unknown origin.