Key Insights in Nearby Galaxies: Radio Continuum Survey of the KINGFISH Galaxies

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Nearby galaxies provide ideal laboratories for studying astrophysical processes that regulate the evolution of galaxies, among them the interplay between the star formation and ISM. The Herschel space observatory stands poised to make major breakthroughs in this area, by mapping with unprecedented spatial resolution the emission from dust and the gas content of galaxies. As an extinction-free tracer of star formation, the radio continuum emission provides crucial complementary information about magnetic fields and cosmic ray electrons (CREs). Only recently variations of one of the tightest and most universal relations, the radio-IR correlation, became apparent when studying scales within galaxies. However, this needs to be established by studying a comprehensive sample of galaxies spanning a large range in star formation and magnetic field properties. Taking full advantage of the KINGFISH dataset along with our careful techniques for separating the radio continuum components we plan to a) use our Effelsberg data to analyze for the first time global relations between star formation, magnetic fields, and synchrotron spectral index, b) dissect the radio-IR relation in its various component using Herschel PACS+SPIRE and VLA+Effelsberg data for NGC6946 and c) assemble the ultimate high resolution radio continuum database for nearby galaxies using EVLA.