The extragalactic background light: lower vs upper limits

Abstract

The discovery of distant sources of very high energy (VHE) gamma-rays with hard energy spectra enabled to derive strong upper limits on the density of the extragalactic background light (EBL). These limits are close to the lower limits derived from deep source counts. A recent re-determination of the EBL contribution from resolved sources at 3.6 micrometer finds a higher EBL density, which is claimed to be in conflict with the assumptions utilized to derive the EBL upper limits from VHE spectra. Here, it is shown that is possible to recover the canonical Gamma~1.5 intrinsic spectra for such a higher EBL density.