The Galactic center excess at the highest energies: morphology and photon-count statistics

The nature of the GeV gamma-ray Galactic center excess (GCE) in the data of Fermi-Large Area Telescope (LAT) is still to be unveiled. We present a new analysis of the inner Galaxy Fermi-LAT data at energies above 10 GeV, based on an innovative method which combines the skyFACT adaptive template fitting with and the 1pPDF pixel-count statistics. We find a strong evidence for the GCE also at high energies, $\sigma > 5$ regardless of the GCE spatial template. Remarkably, our fits prefer the bulge morphological model over the dark matter one at high significance, and show no evidence for an additional dark matter template on top of the bulge component. Through the 1pPDF analysis, we find that the model best describing the gamma-ray data requires a smooth, diffuse GCE following a bulge morphology, together with sub-threshold point sources. The 1pPDF fit reconstructs a consistent population of faint point sources down at least to $10^{-12}$ ph cm$^{-2}$ s$^{-1}$. Between $10^{-12}$ ph cm$^{-2}$ s$^{-1}$ and $10^{-11}$ ph cm$^{-2}$ s$^{-1}$ the 1pPDF measures a number of point sources significantly higher than the ones in the Fermi 4FGL catalog. The robustness of our results brings further support to the attempt of explaining, at least partially, the high-energy tail of the GCE in terms of a population of point sources, likely corresponding to millisecond pulsars.