Disentangling the galactic and intergalactic components in 313 observed Lyman-alpha line profiles between redshift 0 and 5
Abstract
Lyman-Alpha (Lya) photons emitted in star-forming galaxies undergo complex radiative transfer through the interstellar (ISM), circumgalactic (CGM), and intergalactic medium (IGM), imprinting characteristic signatures on their observed line profiles. We use the open-source package zELDA (redshift Estimator for Line profiles of Distant Lyman-Alpha emitters) to disentangle the galactic and intergalactic contributions in 313 Lya spectra observed with HST/COS and MUSE, spanning 0<z<6. zELDA employs artificial neural networks trained on mock Lya spectra generated with Monte Carlo radiative transfer through thin-shell models and IGM transmission curves from the TNG100 simulation. We find that sources at exhibit minimal IGM attenuation, whereas at the IGM significantly suppresses the blue peak of Lya. After correcting for IGM effects, the stacked intrinsic galactic Lya line profiles display remarkably little evolution from to . We measure the mean IGM Lya escape fraction, finding for z<0.5, decreasing from at to at . Our measurement of the redshift evolution of the Lya IGM escape fraction agrees with independent constraints on the IGM mean optical depth. After a comparison between our estimation and the global Lya escape fraction from the literature, our findings indicate that the IGM might dominate Lya observability at redshift z5.0, after which ISM and CGM effects tend to dominate at lower . Our results demonstrate that zELDA enables robust reconstruction of intrinsic Lya spectra and provides a direct probe of the interplay between galactic outflows and IGM transmission across cosmic time.
Cite
@article{arxiv.2503.03824,
title = {Disentangling the galactic and intergalactic components in 313 observed Lyman-alpha line profiles between redshift 0 and 5},
author = {Siddhartha Gurung-López and Chris Byrohl and Max Gronke and Daniele Spinoso and Alberto Torralba and Alberto Fernández-Soto and Pablo Arnalte-Mur and Vicent J. Martínez},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2503.03824},
year = {2026}
}
Comments
30 pages. Published in the Open Journal of Astrophysics