GeV Observations of Star-forming Galaxies with the Fermi Large Area Telescope

ACKERMAN M.; CILLIS, ANALIA N.; THE FERMI-LAT COLLABORATION (129 COAUTHORS, CILLIS CONTACT AUTHOR)

ASTROPHYSICAL JOURNAL

IOP PUBLISHING LTD

Lugar: Londres; Año: 2012 vol. 755 p. 164 - 187

0004-637X

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