Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope

A review on the Extragalactic Background Light

Alberto Dominguez
Ajello, Finke, Reyes and Reimer for the Fermi-LAT Collaboration

Abstract:

Tremendous progress has been made on the understanding of the Extragalactic Background Light (EBL) in the last few years. Deep galaxy surveys have allowed us to accurately model the lower redshift EBL, at least, from the ultraviolet to the mid-infrared. Furthermore, gamma-ray observations by the Fermi satellite as well as Cherenkov telescopes have, in general, confirmed the EBL estimates from galaxy surveys and other direct detections. Interestingly, these gamma-ray observations allow us to infer EBL properties at larger redshifts where the predictions from EBL models diverge. We review in this talk the current status of our EBL knowledge, and present and future lines of work, from both galaxy evolution and gamma-ray points of view. In particular, we mainly focus on the fundamental role that the Fermi satellite has played and will keep playing in the field for the next years.