3FHL: The Third Catalog of Hard Fermi-LAT Sources

TLDR

The study presents a catalog of sources detected above 10 GeV by the Fermi Large Area Telescope in its first seven years of data. The catalog was produced using the Pass 8 event‑level analysis of the LAT. The 3FHL catalog lists 1,556 γ‑ray sources between 10 GeV and 2 TeV, with sensitivity and angular resolution improved by factors of 3 and 2 over 1FHL, 79 % extragalactic, 8 % Galactic, 13 % unassociated, 214 new detections, and shows significant spectral curvature in 32 sources and flux variability in 163, while demonstrating that the >10 GeV range contains twice as many sources as >50 GeV at the same flux limit, underscoring the value of lowering energy thresholds for future Cherenkov telescopes.

Abstract

We present a catalog of sources detected above 10 GeV by the Fermi Large Area Telescope (LAT) in the first 7 years of data using the Pass 8 event-level analysis. This is the Third Catalog of Hard Fermi-LAT Sources (3FHL), containing 1556 objects characterized in the 10 GeV - 2 TeV energy range. The sensitivity and angular resolution are improved by factors of 3 and 2 relative to the previous LAT catalog at the same energies (1FHL). The vast majority of detected sources (79%) are associated with extragalactic counterparts at other wavelengths, including 16 sources located at very high redshift ($z>2$). Eight percent of the sources have Galactic counterparts and 13% are unassociated (or associated with a source of unknown nature). The high-latitude sky and the Galactic plane are observed with a flux sensitivity of 4.4 to 9.5$\times 10^{-11}$ ph cm$^{-2}$ s$^{-1}$, respectively (this is approximately 0.5% and 1% of the Crab Nebula flux above 10 GeV). The catalog includes 214 new $\gamma$-ray sources. The substantial increase in the number of photons (more than 4 times relative to 1FHL and 10 times to 2FHL) also allows us to measure significant spectral curvature for 32 sources and find flux variability for 163 of them. Furthermore, we estimate that for the same flux limit of $10^{-12}$ erg cm$^{-2}$ s$^{-1}$, the energy range above 10 GeV has twice as many sources as above 50 GeV, highlighting the importance, for future Cherenkov telescopes, of lowering the energy threshold as much as possible.