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Description
The CGRO/EGRET Revised Catalog of Gamma-Ray Sources (EGR) is a catalog of point gamma-ray sources detected by the EGRET detector on the Compton Gamma Ray Observatory. The authors used the entire EGRET gamma-ray dataset of reprocessed photons at energies above 100 MeV and new Galactic interstellar emission models based on CO, H I, dark gas, and interstellar radiation field data. Two different assumptions are used to describe the cosmic-ray distribution in the Galaxy to analyse the systematic uncertainties in source detection and characterization. The authors applied a 2-dimensional maximum-likelihood detection method similar to that used to analyze the 3rd EGRET catalogue (3EG: Hartman et al. 1999, ApJS, 123, 79, available as the EGRET3 Catalog in Browse). The revised EGRET catalog (EGR) lists 188 sources, 14 of which are marked as confused, in contrast to the 271 entries of the 3rd EGRET (3EG) catalog. The authors do not detect 107 sources discovered previously because additional structure is present in the interstellar background. The vast majority of them were unidentified and marked as possibly extended or confused in the 3EG catalog. In particular, the authors do not confirm most of the 3EG sources associated with the local clouds of the Gould Belt. Alternatively, they have found 30 new sources that have no 3EG counterpart. The new error circles for the confirmed 3EG sources largely overlap the previous ones, but several counterparts of particular interest discussed before, such as Sgr A*, radio galaxies, and several microquasars are now found outside the error circles. The authors cross-correlated the source positions with a large number of radio pulsars, pulsar wind nebulae, supernova remnants, OB associations, blazars and flat radiosources and they found a surprising large number of sources (87) at all latitudes that have no counterpart among the potential gamma-ray emitters. Sources found within a radius of 1.5 PSF FWHM of a very bright source, and/or with very asymmetric TS map contours, are not included in the primary list of EGR sources but are included as EGRc sources herein. The EGRc sources represent significant excesses of photons above the background that may be due to extended sources, or structures not properly modeled in the interstellar emission, or artefacts due to incorrect PSF tails. As noted above, there are 188 sources in this catalog: since there are multiple measurements for these sources corresponding to the various viewing periods, there are 1640 entries in the HEASARC's version of the Revised EGRET Catalog, corresponding to 1512 'observations' of the 174 primary gamma-ray sources plus 128 'observations' of the 14 confused sources. Thus, there are an average of about 9 entries for every gamma-ray source. This table was created by the HEASARC in March 2009 based on the electronic versions of Tables A1 and B1 from the paper, which were obtained from the CDS, their catalog J/A+A/489/849 files egr.dat and egrc.dat. This is a service provided by NASA HEASARC .
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