English

Modeling $237$ Lyman-$\alpha$ spectra of the MUSE-Wide survey

Astrophysics of Galaxies 2017-12-20 v1

Abstract

We compare 237237 Lyman-α\alpha (Lyα\alpha) spectra of the "MUSE-Wide survey" (Herenz et al. 2017) to a suite of radiative transfer simulations consisting of a central luminous source within a concentric, moving shell of neutral gas, and dust. This six parameter shell-model has been used numerously in previous studies, however, on significantly smaller data-sets. We find that the shell-model can reproduce the observed spectral shape very well - better than the also common `Gaussian-minus-Gaussian' model which we also fitted to the dataset. Specifically, we find that 94%\sim 94\% of the fits possess a goodness-of-fit value of p(χ2)>0.1p(\chi^2)>0.1. The large number of spectra allows us to robustly characterize the shell-model parameter range, and consequently, the spectral shapes typical for realistic spectra. We find that the vast majority of the Lyα\alpha spectral shapes require an outflow and only 5%\sim 5\% are well-fitted through an inflowing shell. In addition, we find 46%\sim 46\% of the spectra to be consistent with a neutral hydrogen column density <1017cm2<10^{17}\,\mathrm{cm}^{-2} - suggestive of a non-negligible fraction of continuum leakers in the MUSE-Wide sample. Furthermore, we correlate the spectral against the Lyα\alpha halo properties against each other but do not find any strong correlation.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.1709.07008,
  title  = {Modeling $237$ Lyman-$\alpha$ spectra of the MUSE-Wide survey},
  author = {Max Gronke},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1709.07008},
  year   = {2017}
}

Comments

10 pages, 7 figures; data can be downloaded at http://bit.ly/a-spectra-of-MW