Resumen
The second catalog of high-energy γ-ray sources detected by the Large Area Telescope (LAT), the primary science instrument on the Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope, allows us for the first time to perform a modeling of the galactic distribution of such sources based on the method of summing up all detectable sources in a grid of lines of sight. The challenge is to produce reliable estimates of counts from small numbers. The catalog contains 1873 sources over the whole sky, giving an average of 0.036 counts/deg^{2} for |b| > 60°. In a narrow strip centered at |b| < 0.5° we find 128 sources. In this work, we describe our attempts to estimate the density of γ-ray sources along both galactic longitude and galactic latitude. The results of the estimated source counts are compared with the predictions of a model which has an exponential distribution in the radial direction as well as an exponential distribution above the galactic plane. Our conclusions point to a radial length scale consistent with that obtained from near-infrared counts and a very short height scale, typical of very young populations in the Galaxy. We tested both Gaussian and Power-Law forms for the luminosity function. The luminosities cover the range 10^{33}-10^{36} erg/s in the 100 MeV-100 GeV band with space densities (in the solar neighborhood) of ∼ 10^{-8}/pc^{3}.
