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A Serendipitous Search for High-Redshift Lyman alpha Emission: Two Primeval Galaxy Candidates at z~3 by Manning, Curtis; Stern, Daniel; Spinrad, Hyron; Bunker, Andrew J. is a scholarly article available to read on EtoBox.

What is A Serendipitous Search for High-Redshift Lyman alpha Emission: Two Primeval Galaxy Candidates at z~3 about?

In the course of our ongoing search for serendipitous high-redshift Lyman alpha (LyA) Emissionin deep archival Keck spectra, we discovered two very high equivalent width (W_{obs} ~ 450A, 2-sigma) LyA emission line candidates at z ~3 in a moderate dispersion (R~1200) spectrogram. Both lines have low velocity dispersions (sigma_v ~ 60 km/s) and deconvolved radii r ~ 1 kpc (h = 0.5). We argue that the lines are LyA, and are powered by stellar ionization. The surface density of robust, high equivalent width LyA candidates is estimated to be ~3 \pm 2 per arcmin^2 per unit redshift at z ~ 3, consistent with the estimate of Cowie etal (1998). The LyA emission line source characteristics are consistent with the galaxies undergoing their first burst of star formation, ie, with being primeval. Source sizes and velocity dispersions are comparable to the theoretical primeval galaxy model of Lin and Murray (1992) based on the inside-out, self-similar collapse of an isothermal sphere. In this model, star formation among field galaxies is a protracted process. Galaxies are thought to be able to display high equivalent widths for only the first few x 10 Myr. This time is short in relation to the d

Author

Manning, Curtis; Stern, Daniel; Spinrad, Hyron; Bunker, Andrew J.

Published

2000

Language

EN