Testing Cosmic-Ray Acceleration in Young, Embedded Stellar Clusters

Most of the massive stars appear grouped in clusters located in giant molecular clouds. Their strong wind activity generates large structures known as stellar wind bubbles and induces collective effects which could accelerate particles up to high energy and produce gamma-rays. The best objects to observe these effects are young massive star clusters in which no supernova explosion has occurred yet. We model these star clusters as a spherical leaky box (the molecular cloud) surrounding a central cosmic ray source (the stellar cluster). We developed a phenomenological model to estimate the cosmic and gamma-ray production for a set of 8 selected clusters. We compare the predicted gamma-ray emission with data obtained with the Fermi-LAT telescope. No significant emission has been detected from any of the selected cluster. Comparing the upper limit on the gamma-ray flux with the prediction from our phenomenological model indicates that not more than 10% of the stellar wind luminosity of the stellar clusters is converted into cosmic rays. If all O-type stars do not contribute more than 10% of their stellar wind luminosity to cosmic-ray acceleration they do not contribute to more than on percent of the total cosmic-ray luminosity.