GeV OBSERVATIONS OF STAR-FORMING GALAXIES WITH THE FERMI LARGE AREA TELESCOPE

By F. C. M. Ackermann, M. Ajello, A. Allafort, L. Baldini, J. Ballet, D. Bastieri, K. Bechtol, R. Bellazzini, B. Berenji, E. Bloom and 119 more. Astrophysical Journal, 2012

274 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Recent detections of the starburst galaxies M82 and NGC 253 by gamma-ray telescopes suggest that galaxies rapidly forming massive stars are more luminous at gamma-ray energies compared to their quiescent relatives. Building upon those results, we examine a sample of 69 dwarf, spiral, and luminous and ultraluminous infrared galaxies at photon energies 0.1–100 GeV using 3 years of data collected by the Large Area Telescope (LAT) on the Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope (Fermi). Measured fluxes from significantly detected sources and flux upper limits for the remaining galaxies are used to explore the physics of cosmic rays in galaxies. We find further evidence for quasi-linear scaling relations between gamma-ray luminosity and both radio continuum luminosity and total infrared luminosity which apply both to quiescent galaxies of the Local Group and low-redshift starburst galaxies (conservative P-values ≲ 0.05 accounting for statistical and systematic uncertainties). The normalizations of these scaling relations correspond to luminosity ratios of log (L0.1–100 GeV/L1.4 GHz) = 1.7 ± 0.1(statistical) ± 0.2(dispersion) and log (L0.1–100 GeV/L8–1000 μm) = −4.3 ± 0.1(statistical) ± 0.2(dispersion) for a galaxy with a star formation rate of 1 M☉ yr−1, assuming a Chabrier initial mass function. Using the relationship between infrared luminosity and gamma-ray luminosity, the collective intensity of unresolved star-forming galaxies at redshifts 0 < z < 2.5 above 0.1 GeV is estimated to be 0.4–2.4 × 10−6 ph cm−2 s−1 sr−1 (4%–23% of the intensity of the isotropic diffuse component measured with the LAT). We anticipate that ∼10 galaxies could be detected by their cosmic-ray-induced gamma-ray emission during a 10 year Fermi mission.

Subfields: Astronomy and Astrophysics, Nuclear and High Energy Physics

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/e829bb48e1574cea06474e6704f251e6ada96cff

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In Astronomy and Astrophysics

1. A. Strong
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In Nuclear and High Energy Physics

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Citations in the corpus

• THE SPECTRUM OF ISOTROPIC DIFFUSE GAMMA-RAY EMISSION BETWEEN 100 MeV AND 820 GeV (2014, methodology): “…density of H2 gas (WCO > 2.5 K km s −1) along the respective line of sight as well as lines of sight with a significant column density of Hi gas (NHI > 5×1020 cm−2) located beyond our local solar neighborhood (8 kpc < r <10 kpc) according to the gas distribution model in Ackermann et al. (2012b).”
• Active galactic nuclei: what’s in a name? (2017, background): “39 With the exception of NGC 1068 and NGC 4945, two Seyfert 2 galaxies in which the γ -ray emission is thought to be related to their starburst component (Ackermann et al. 2012b).”
• An Indication of Anisotropy in Arrival Directions of Ultra-high-energy Cosmic Rays through Comparison to the Flux Pattern of Extragalactic Gamma-Ray Sources (2018, methodology): “The starburst model additionally captures the UHECR excess close to the Galactic South Pole, interpreted as contributions from NGC1068 and NGC253, yielding an increase in the anisotropy signal from 3s~ to 4s. Additional diffuse contributions from clustered sources in the 2MRS catalog are not favored”
• The faint radio sky: radio astronomy becomes mainstream (2016, background): “There are no RQ AGN detected in theγ-rays32 (Ackermann et al., 2012a).”
• THE FIRST FERMI LAT SUPERNOVA REMNANT CATALOG (2015, methodology): “To account for a possible large scale gradient of CR densities, the gas column density maps were split into six Galactocentric rings using the emission lines’ Doppler shifts and a Galactic rotation curve (see Appendix B of Ackermann et al. 2012b).”
• The Nine Lives of Cosmic Rays in Galaxies (2015, methodology): “15 of Ackermann et al. 2012g), together with its decomposition into continuum and line emission components, positronium included (Bouchet et al. 2011, Strong 2011).”
• THE THIRD CATALOG OF ACTIVE GALACTIC NUCLEI DETECTED BY THE FERMI LARGE AREA TELESCOPE (2015, background): “…et al. 2012; Finke 2013; Giommi et al. 2013), provided suitable samples, e.g., to probe the Extragalactic Background Light (EBL, Abdo et al. 2010c; Ackermann et al. 2012c), offered suitable target lists to investigate the dichotomy between gamma-ray loud and gamma-ray quiet blazars at other…”
• THE ORIGIN OF THE EXTRAGALACTIC GAMMA-RAY BACKGROUND AND IMPLICATIONS FOR DARK MATTER ANNIHILATION (2015, background): “…because of the constraint placed by the level of the 4We neglected the secondary emission due to electromagnetic cascades created by electron-positron pairs generated in the interaction of γ-rays with the EBL. small-scale anisotropies of the γ-ray sky as measured by Fermi (Ackermann et al. 2012).”