English

The dominant origin of diffuse Ly$\alpha$ halos around LAEs explored by SED fitting and clustering analysis

Astrophysics of Galaxies 2019-05-23 v3

Abstract

The physical origin of diffuse Lyα\alpha halos (LAHs) around star-forming galaxies is still a matter of debate. We present the dependence of LAH luminosity (L(Lyα)HL({\rm Ly}\alpha)_H) on the stellar mass (MM_\star), SFRSFR, color excess (E(BV)E(B-V)_\star), and dark matter halo mass (MhM_{\rm h}) of the parent galaxy for 900\sim 900 Lyα\alpha emitters (LAEs) at z2z\sim2 divided into ten subsamples. We calculate L(Lyα)HL({\rm Ly}\alpha)_H using the stacked observational relation between L(Lyα)HL({\rm Ly}\alpha)_H and central Lyα\alpha luminosity by Momose et al. (2016), which we find agrees with the average trend of VLT/MUSE-detected individual LAEs. We find that our LAEs have relatively high L(Lyα)HL({\rm Ly}\alpha)_H despite low MM_\star and MhM_{\rm h}, and that L(Lyα)HL({\rm Ly}\alpha)_H remains almost unchanged with MM_\star and perhaps with MhM_{\rm h}. These results are incompatible with the cold stream (cooling radiation) scenario and the satellite-galaxy star-formation scenario, because the former predicts fainter L(Lyα)HL({\rm Ly}\alpha)_H and both predict steeper L(Lyα)HL({\rm Ly}\alpha)_H vs. MM_\star slopes. We argue that LAHs are mainly caused by Lyα\alpha photons escaping from the main body and then scattered in the circum-galactic medium. This argument is supported by LAH observations of Hα\alpha emitters (HAEs). When LAHs are taken into account, the Lyα\alpha escape fractions of our LAEs are about ten times higher than those of HAEs with similar MM_\star or E(BV)E(B-V)_\star, which may partly arise from lower HI gas masses implied from lower MhM_{\rm h} at fixed MM_\star, or from another Lyα\alpha source in the central part.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.1803.10265,
  title  = {The dominant origin of diffuse Ly$\alpha$ halos around LAEs explored by SED fitting and clustering analysis},
  author = {Haruka Kusakabe and Kazuhiro Shimasaku and Rieko Momose and Masami Ouchi and Kimihiko Nakajima and Takuya Hashimoto and Yuichi Harikane and John D. Silverman and Peter L. Capak},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1803.10265},
  year   = {2019}
}

Comments

Published in PASJ; 35 pages, 13 figures, 6 tables