The Low-Redshift Lyman Continuum Survey I: New, Diverse Local Lyman-Continuum Emitters
Abstract
The origins of Lyman continuum (LyC) photons responsible for the reionization of the universe are as of yet unknown and highly contested. Detecting LyC photons from the epoch of reionization is not possible due to absorption by the intergalactic medium, which has prompted the development of several indirect diagnostics to infer the rate at which galaxies contribute LyC photons to reionize the universe by studying lower-redshift analogs. We present the Low-redshift Lyman Continuum Survey (LzLCS) comprising measurements made with HST/COS for a z=0.2-0.4 sample of 66 galaxies. After careful processing of the FUV spectra, we obtain a total of 35 Lyman continuum emitters (LCEs) detected with 97.725% confidence, nearly tripling the number of known local LCEs. We estimate escape fractions from the detected LyC flux and upper limits on the undetected LyC flux, finding a range of LyC escape fractions up to 50%. Of the 35 LzLCS LCEs, 12 have LyC escape fractions greater than 5%, more than doubling the number of known local LCEs with cosmologically relevant LyC escape.
Keywords
Cite
@article{arxiv.2201.11716,
title = {The Low-Redshift Lyman Continuum Survey I: New, Diverse Local Lyman-Continuum Emitters},
author = {Sophia R. Flury and Anne E. Jaskot and Harry C. Ferguson and Gabor Worseck and Kirill Makan and John Chisholm and Alberto Saldana-Lopez and Daniel Schaerer and Stephan McCandless and Bingjie Wang and N. M. Ford and Timothy Heckman and Zhiyuan Ji and Mauro Giavalisco and Ricardo Amorin and Hakim Atek and Jeremy Blaizot and Sanchayeeta Borthakur and Cody Carr and Marco Castellano and Stefano Cristiani and Stephane de Barros and Mark Dickinson and Steven L. Finkelstein and Brian Fleming and Fabio Fontanot and Thibault Garel and Andrea Grazian and Matthew Hayes and Alaina Henry and Valentin Mauerhofer and Genoveva Micheva and M. S. Oey and Goran Ostlin and Casey Papovich and Laura Pentericci and Swara Ravindranath and Joakim Rosdahl and Michael Rutkowski and Paola Santini and Claudia Scarlata and Harry Teplitz and Trinh Thuan and Maxime Trebitsch and Eros Vanzella and Anne Verhamme and Xinfeng Xu},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2201.11716},
year = {2022}
}
Comments
ApJS, accepted. 28 pages, 19 figures, 8 tables. Full machine readable tables will be made available by the publisher at the time of publication