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Deep HeII and CIV Spectroscopy of a Giant Lyman alpha Nebula: Dense Compact Gas Clumps in the Circumgalactic Medium of a z~2 Quasar by Battaia, Fabrizio Arrigoni; Hennawi, Joseph F.; Prochaska, J. Xavier; Cantalupo, Sebastiano is a scholarly article available to read on EtoBox.

What is Deep HeII and CIV Spectroscopy of a Giant Lyman alpha Nebula: Dense Compact Gas Clumps in the Circumgalactic Medium of a z~2 Quasar about?

The recent discovery by Cantalupo et al. (2014) of the largest (~500 kpc) and luminous Ly-alpha nebula associated with the quasar UM287 (z=2.279) poses a great challenge to our current understanding of the astrophysics of the halos hosting massive z~2 galaxies. Either an enormous reservoir of cool gas is required $M\simeq10^{12}$ $M_{\odot}$, exceeding the expected baryonic mass available, or one must invoke extreme gas clumping factors not present in high-resolution cosmological simulations. However, observations of Ly-alpha emission alone cannot distinguish between these two scenarios. We have obtained the deepest ever spectroscopic integrations in the HeII and CIV lines with the goal of detecting extended line emission, but detect neither line to a 3$\sigma$ limiting SB $\simeq10^{-18}$ erg/s/cm$^2$/arcsec$^2$. We construct models of the expected emission spectrum in the highly probable scenario that the nebula is powered by photoionization from the central hyper-luminous quasar. The non-detection of HeII implies that the nebular emission arises from a mass $M_{\rm c}\lesssim6.4\times10^{10}$ $M_{\odot}$ of cool gas on ~200 kpc scales, distributed in a population of remarkably d

Author

Battaia, Fabrizio Arrigoni; Hennawi, Joseph F.; Prochaska, J. Xavier; Cantalupo, Sebastiano

Published

2015

Language

EN