English

Cross-correlations between the CLAMATO Lyman-alpha forest and galaxies within the COSMOS field

Cosmology and Nongalactic Astrophysics 2026-04-28 v3 Astrophysics of Galaxies

Abstract

We compute the 3D cross-correlation between the absorption of the z2.3z\sim 2.3 Lyman-alpha forest measured by the COSMOS Lyman-Alpha Mapping And Tomography Observations (CLAMATO) survey, and 1642 foreground galaxies with spectroscopic redshifts from several different surveys, including 3D-HST, CLAMATO, zCOSMOS-deep, MOSDEF, and VUDS. For each survey, we compare the measured cross-correlation with models incorporating the galaxy linear bias as well as observed redshift dispersion and systematic redshift offset. The derived redshift dispersion and offsets are generally consistent with those expected from, e.g., spectroscopic redshifts measured with UV absorption lines or NIR emission lines observed with specific instruments, but we find hints of `fingers-of-god' caused by overdensities in the field. We combine our foreground galaxy sample, and split them into 3 bins of robustly-estimated stellar mass in order to study the stellar mass-halo mass relationship. For sub-samples with median stellar masses of log10(M/M)=[9.28,9.74,10.22]\log_{10}(M_* / M_\odot) = [9.28,9.74,10.22], we find galaxy biases of bg[2.1,3.2,3.8]b_g\approx [2.1, 3.2,3.8], respectively. A comparison with mock measurements from the Bolshoi-Planck NN-body simulation yields corresponding halo masses of log10(M/M)[10.5,11.7,12.1]\log_{10}(M_* / M_\odot) \approx [10.5,11.7,12.1] for these stellar mass bins. At the low mass end, our results suggest enhanced star formation histories in mild tension with predictions from previous angular correlation and abundance matching-based observations, and the IllustrisTNG simulation.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2509.07453,
  title  = {Cross-correlations between the CLAMATO Lyman-alpha forest and galaxies within the COSMOS field},
  author = {Benjamin Zhang and Khee-Gan Lee and Andrei Cuceu and Andreu Font-Ribera and Rieko Momose},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2509.07453},
  year   = {2026}
}

Comments

17 pages, 9 figures, 3 tables; values in Table 2 corrected, minor revisions in response to referee comments. Accepted to MNRAS