Title: Consistency Between the Luminosity Function of Resolved Millisecond Pulsars and the Galactic Center Excess,
Abstract: Fermi Large Area Telescope data reveal an excess of GeV gamma rays from the
direction of the Galactic Center and bulge. Several explanations have been
proposed for this excess including an unresolved population of millisecond
pulsars (MSPs) and self-annihilating dark matter. It has been claimed that a
key discriminant for or against the MSP explanation can be extracted from the
properties of the luminosity function describing this source population.
Specifically, is the luminosity function of the putative MSPs in the Galactic
Center consistent with that characterizing the resolved MSPs in the Galactic
disk? To investigate this we have used a Bayesian Markov Chain Monte Carlo to
evaluate the posterior distribution of the parameters of the MSP luminosity
function describing both resolved MSPs and the Galactic Center excess. At
variance with some other claims, our analysis reveals that, within current
uncertainties, both data sets can be well fit with the same luminosity
function.