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

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Using data obtained as part of the {\it 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 {\it 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.
2 pages, 1 figure; To appear in "Studying Galaxy Evolution with Spitzer and Herschel", conference held in Crete, Greece, May 2006. CUP conference series eds. V.Charmandaris, D.Rigopoulou, and N.D. Kylafis

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http://salesiana.dossiersoluciones.com/handle/123456789/115865

Consulte el texto completo en el siguiente enlace:

https://arxiv.org/abs/astro-ph/0609038
 http://arxiv.org/abs/astro-ph/0609038

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arXiv