H I gas in higher density regions of the intergalactic medium
Abstract
Using H I absorption alone, we attempt to separate H I absorption lines in quasar spectra into two categories; HDLs (Higher Density Lines) and LDLs (Lower Density Lines), and we discuss the difference in their physical properties. We deblend and fit all H I lines with Voigt profiles, and make an unbiased sample of H I lines covering a wide column density range (12 < log N_HI < 19 cm^-2). To reduce the influence of line blending, we simultaneously fit several Lyman series lines. As a result of a two-point correlation analysis, we found that higher column density H I lines are clustering at v < 200 km/s, while lower ones at v < 100 km/s. We define HDLs as H I lines with 15 < log N_HI < 19 cm^-2 and all H I lines within +/- 200 km/s of a line with log N_HI > 15 cm^-2, and LDLs as others with 12 < log N_HI < 15 cm^-2. We found that the HDLs have smaller minimum b-values for a given column density than the LDLs. This difference is successfully reproduced by our Hydrodynamic simulation. The LDLs seem to be cool or shock-heated diffuse IGM gas, while the HDLs are likely to be cooler dense gas near to galaxies.
Keywords
Cite
@article{arxiv.astro-ph/0409299,
title = {H I gas in higher density regions of the intergalactic medium},
author = {T. Misawa and D. Tytler and M. Iye and P. Paschos and M. Norman and D. Kirkman and J. O'Meara and N. Suzuki and N. Kashikawa},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:astro-ph/0409299},
year = {2009}
}
Comments
22 pages, 7 figures, accepted for publication in the Astronomical Journal