An Ultraluminous Lyman Alpha Emitter with a Blue Wing at z=6.6
Abstract
We report the detection of the most luminous high-redshift Lyman Alpha Emitting galaxy (LAE) yet seen, with log L(Ly alpha) = 43.9 ergs/s. The galaxy -- COSMOS Lyman alpha 1, or COLA1 -- was detected in a search for ultra-luminous LAEs with Hyper Suprime-Cam on the Subaru telescope. It was confirmed to lie at z = 6.593 based on a Lyman alpha line detection obtained from followup spectroscopy with the DEIMOS spectrograph on Keck2. COLA1 is the first very high-redshift LAE to show a multi-component Lyman alpha line profile with a blue wing, which suggests that it could lie in a highly ionized region of the intergalactic medium and could have significant infall. If this interpretation is correct, then ultra-luminous LAEs like COLA1 offer a unique opportunity to determine the properties of the HII regions around these galaxies which will help in understanding the ionization of the z ~ 7 intergalactic medium.
Cite
@article{arxiv.1606.03526,
title = {An Ultraluminous Lyman Alpha Emitter with a Blue Wing at z=6.6},
author = {E. M. Hu and L. L. Cowie and A. Songaila and A. J. Barger and B. Rosenwasser and I. Wold},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1606.03526},
year = {2016}
}
Comments
6 pages, 4 figures, 1 table, accepted for publication in ApJ Letters