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25 Mysteries of the Cosmic Gamma-Ray Background: the universe’s invisible static hiding its loudest secrets

An ocean of invisible, high‑energy light quietly fills the sky—cosmic static you can’t tune away, powered by cataclysms. This is the cosmic gamma‑ray background, a faint all‑sky glow first mapped in depth by Fermi‑LAT. In this deep dive, we unpack 25 Mysteries of the Cosmic Gamma‑Ray Background, chasing clues from ravenous black holes, elusive dark matter, and engines that hurl particles near light speed.

What forges the diffuse haze? Legions of blazars may stack into a mist, joined by misaligned radio galaxies and ordinary star‑forming galaxies where cosmic rays strike gas. The afterglows of countless GRBs, pulsar wind nebulae, and supernova remnants could add their sparks. On grander scales, cluster traps and structure‑formation shocks may braid a web of emission, with intracluster starlight as faint tinder. Or is a slice outright exotic—dark matter annihilation or decay, whispering primordial black holes, even snapping cosmic strings?

To separate culprits from coincidence, we read the sky’s fingerprints: tiny anisotropies, a spectrum with curious bends, and a high‑energy cutoff sculpted by the Extragalactic Background Light. We wrestle with missing point sources, a stubborn isotropic floor, and the bright Milky Way foreground that must be peeled away. Cross‑correlating gamma maps with radio, infrared, and lensing surveys narrows the field, while variability tests ask if the glow is steady or flickers. Solve one knot—like anisotropy—and blazar budgets shift, squeezing room for dark matter. Next‑gen eyes like CTA and Athena promise sharper maps, deeper counts, and maybe the spectral fingerprint of new physics.

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