Direct Detection of Lyman Continuum Escape from Local Starburst Galaxies with the Cosmic Origins Spectrograph

Understand

We report on the detection of Lyman continuum radiation in two nearby starburst galaxies.

• Tol 0440-381, Tol 1247-232 and Mrk 54 were observed with the Cosmic Origins Spectrograph onboard the Hubble Space Telescopes.
• The three galaxies have radial velocities of ~13,000 km/s, permitting a ~35 A window on the restframe Lyman continuum shortward of the Milky Way Lyman edge at 912 A.
• The chosen instrument configuration using the G140L grating covers the spectral range from 912 to 2,000 {\AA}.