The region surrounding the center of the Milky Way is both astrophysically rich and complex , and is predicted to contain very high densities of dark matter .
Utilizing three years of data from the Fermi Gamma Ray Space Telescope ( and the recently available Pass 7 ultraclean event class ) , we study the morphology and spectrum of the gamma ray emission from this region and find evidence of a spatially extended component which peaks at energies between 300 MeV and 10 GeV .
We compare our results to those reported by other groups and find good agreement .
The extended emission could potentially originate from either the annihilations of dark matter particles in the inner galaxy , or from the collisions of high energy protons that are accelerated by the Milky Way ’ s supermassive black hole with gas .
If interpreted as dark matter annihilation products , the emission spectrum favors dark matter particles with a mass in the range of 7-12 GeV ( if annihilating dominantly to leptons ) or 25-45 GeV ( if annihilating dominantly to hadronic final states ) .
The intensity of the emission corresponds to a dark matter annihilation cross section consistent with that required to generate the observed cosmological abundance in the early universe ( \sigma v \sim 3 \times 10 ^ { -26 } cm ^ { 3 } /s ) .
We also present conservative limits on the dark matter annihilation cross section which are at least as stringent as those derived from other observations .