English

CLEAR: Boosted Ly$\alpha$ Transmission of the Intergalactic Medium in UV bright Galaxies

Astrophysics of Galaxies 2022-07-20 v1

Abstract

Reionization is an inhomogeneous process, thought to begin in small ionized bubbles of the intergalactic medium (IGM) around overdense regions of galaxies. Recent Lyman-alpha (Lyα\alpha) studies during the epoch of reionization show growing evidence that ionized bubbles formed earlier around brighter galaxies, suggesting higher IGM transmission of Lyα\alpha from these galaxies. We investigate this problem using IR slitless spectroscopy from the Hubble Space Telescope (HST) Wide-Field Camera 3 (WFC3) G102 grism observations of 148 galaxies selected via photometric redshifts at 6.0<z<8.26.0<z<8.2. These galaxies have spectra extracted from the CANDELS Lyα\alpha Emission at Reionization (CLEAR) survey. We combine the CLEAR data for 275 galaxies with the Keck/DEIMOS+MOSFIRE dataset from the Texas Spectroscopic Search for Lyα\alpha Emission at the End of Reionization Survey. We then constrain the Lyα\alpha equivalent-width (EW) distribution at 6.0<z<8.26.0<z<8.2, which is described by an exponential form, dN/dEWexp(-EW)/W0dN/d\text{EW}\propto\text{exp(-EW)}/W_0, with the characteristic ee-folding scale width (W0W_0). We confirm a significant drop of the Lyα\alpha strength (or W0W_0) at z>6z>6. Furthermore, we compare the redshift evolution of W0W_0 between galaxies at different UV luminosities. The UV-bright (MUV<21M_{\text{UV}}<-21, or LUV>LL_{\text{UV}}>L^{*}) galaxies show weaker evolution with a decrease of 0.4 (±\pm0.2) dex in W0W_0 at z>6z>6 while UV-faint (MUV>21M_{\text{UV}}>-21, or LUV<LL_{\text{UV}}<L^{*}) galaxies exhibit a significant drop by a factor of 0.7-0.8 (±0.2\pm0.2) dex in W0W_0 from z<6z<6 to z>6z>6. Our results add to the accumulating evidence that UV-bright galaxies exhibit boosted Lyα\alpha transmission in the IGM, suggesting that reionization completes sooner in regions proximate to galaxies of higher UV luminosity.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2111.14863,
  title  = {CLEAR: Boosted Ly$\alpha$ Transmission of the Intergalactic Medium in UV bright Galaxies},
  author = {Intae Jung and Casey Papovich and Steven L. Finkelstein and Raymond C. Simons and Vicente Estrada-Carpenter and Bren E. Backhaus and Nikko J. Cleri and Kristian Finlator and Mauro Giavalisco and Zhiyuan Ji and Jasleen Matharu and Ivelina Momcheva and Amber N. Straughn and Jonathan R. Trump},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2111.14863},
  year   = {2022}
}

Comments

21 pages, 9 figures, 2 tables, 1st revision submitted to ApJ