Probing the OVI forest
Abstract
Recent FUSE and STIS observations of OVI absorption at low redshift along the sightline to distant quasars have been interpreted as the signature of a warm-hot diffuse component of the intergalactic medium (IGM). In these proceedings we show that the predicted numbers of such absorbers in numerical simulations agree with the observed characteristics, lending support to this idea. We find that collisionally ionized lines tend to be stronger and wider, while photo-ionized absorbers are weaker and narrower. We also find that a comparison of the predicted distribution of line widths to that observed is marginally too low.
Cite
@article{arxiv.astro-ph/0110659,
title = {Probing the OVI forest},
author = {Greg L. Bryan and Taotao Fang},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:astro-ph/0110659},
year = {2007}
}
Comments
4 pages, to appear in the Proceedings of the Meeting on Gaseous Matter in Galactic and Intergalactic Space, XVIIth IAP Colloquium, Paris, June 2001