Description
The Fermi-LAT has provided an unprecedented view of the gamma-ray sky and in particular has found a host of previously unknown point sources, i.e. the 3FGL. Of the 3033 objects in the 3FGL, 1010 remain unassociated to a particular source class. Additionally, the origin of the GeV-scale excess emission towards the galactic centre remains unknown. Recent statistical studies have shown that the emission could be due to a population of unresolved point sources, in particular millisecond pulsars (MSPs). The ability of MSPs to make up this excess whilst remaining below the detection threshold of Fermi is highly dependent on their gamma-ray luminosity function. We present a statistically rigorous method of analysing the entire 3FGL data set to provide constraints on spatial distributions, luminosity functions, and spectral shapes whilst also providing posteriors for the association of a source to different classes of objects. We do this by combining the power of an unbinned likelihood analysis and generation of the posterior predictive distribution in a Bayesian framework. In this talk I will present our method and discuss its results in the context of the gamma-ray luminosity function of MSPs.
