Joint Astrophysics Colloquium

Giant Gamma-ray Bubbles in the Inner Galaxy: AGN Activity or Bipolar Galactic Wind?

D. Finkbeiner

Harvard CFA

I will discuss our recent paper on the giant gamma-ray bubbles in the inner Galaxy observed by the Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope (http://arxiv.org/abs/1005.5480) and show that these are associated with the structures we have called the “Fermi haze” and “WMAP haze” in the past. The bubbles have sharp edges, suggesting a transient event caused by a huge energy injection in the Galactic center in the last 1-10 Myr, e.g. a BH accretion event or a nuclear starburst. I will argue that these sharp-edged bubbles have nothing to do with a Galactic WIMP annihilation signal, and that they significantly complicate any effort to find such a signal in the inner Galaxy. Moreover, given the presence of such transients it is not even feasible to set useful limits on the electronic signal from dark matter annihilation in the inner Galaxy.