On the Flux and Photon Index Distributions of Fermi-LAT Blazars
Abstract
We present a determination of the distributions of gamma-ray flux and photon index for the 352 blazars detected above ±20º Galactic latitude by the Fermi-LAT in its first year catalog. Because of the observational selection effects the data is truncated severely. We use the methods developed by Efron and Petrosian to reconstruct the intrinsic distribution of fluxes (the so-called LogN-LogS relation) and the true distribution of spectral index. Our method accounts robustly for the selection biases in the data and determines the correlations among the variables. Given the flux distribution, we estimate the contribution of blazars to the extragalactic gamma-ray background.
- Publication:
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AAS/High Energy Astrophysics Division #12
- Pub Date:
- September 2011
- Bibcode:
- 2011HEAD...12.0713P