Skip to content

Relating Diffusion Properties of Cosmic-Ray Electrons to Star Formation Activity within Normal Galaxies

E. J. Murphy, G. Helou, L. Armus, R. Braun, J. D. P. Kenney, the SINGS team

astro-pharXiv:astro-ph/0609038

Abstract

Using data obtained as part of the Spitzer Infrared Nearby Galaxies Survey (SINGS; Kennicutt et al. 2003) and WSRT-SINGS radio continuum survey (Braun et al. 2006), we study the effects of star-formation activity on the far-infrared (FIR)--radio correlation within galaxies. This is done by testing a phenomenological model for the correlation, which describes the radio image as a smeared version of the FIR image. We find that this description works particularly well for galaxies with higher infrared surface brightnesses, yielding best-fit smoothing scale-lengths of a few hundred parsecs, substantially shorter than those for lower surface brightness galaxies. We interpret this result to suggest that galaxies with higher disk averaged star formation rates have had a recent episode of enhanced star formation and are characterized by a higher fraction of young cosmic-ray (CR) electrons compared to galaxies with lower star formation activity.

Create a lesson