  The region surrounding the center of the Milky Way is both astrophysically
rich and complex, and is predicted to contain very high densities of dark
matter. Utilizing three years of data from the Fermi Gamma Ray Space Telescope
(and the recently available Pass 7 ultraclean event class), we study the
morphology and spectrum of the gamma ray emission from this region and find
evidence of a spatially extended component which peaks at energies between 300
MeV and 10 GeV. We compare our results to those reported by other groups and
find good agreement. The extended emission could potentially originate from
either the annihilations of dark matter particles in the inner galaxy, or from
the collisions of high energy protons that are accelerated by the Milky Way's
supermassive black hole with gas. If interpreted as dark matter annihilation
products, the emission spectrum favors dark matter particles with a mass in the
range of 7-12 GeV (if annihilating dominantly to leptons) or 25-45 GeV (if
annihilating dominantly to hadronic final states). The intensity of the
emission corresponds to a dark matter annihilation cross section consistent
with that required to generate the observed cosmological abundance in the early
universe (sigma v ~ 3 x 10^-26 cm^3/s). We also present conservative limits on
the dark matter annihilation cross section which are at least as stringent as
those derived from other observations.
