暗弱高等效宽度莱曼阿尔法发射体中升高的电离光子产生效率
星系天体物理
2020-03-11 v1
摘要
尽管低光度星系在所有红移处都主导数量统计,但由于缺乏对其物理性质的了解,它们对宇宙再电离的贡献仍知之甚少。我们从深层VLT/MUSE光谱中分离出35个z~4-5的连续谱暗弱莱曼阿尔法发射体样本,并利用堆叠的Spitzer/IRAC Ch. 1测光直接测量其Hα发射。基于哈勃空间望远镜成像,我们确定平均UV连续谱星等比-16更暗(约0.01 L_star),意味着中位莱曼阿尔法等效宽度为249埃。通过将Hα测量与UV星等结合,我们确定了电离光子产生效率xi_ion,这是此类暗弱星系的首次测定。log (xi_ion [Hz/erg]) = 26.28 (+0.28; -0.40)的测量值超出文献中对连续谱选与发射线选样本的测定,表明这些低光度、莱曼阿尔法选系统中电离光子的产生更为高效。我们得出结论,这一升高效率可由金属丰度介于4e-4与0.008之间、光权重年龄小于3 Myr的恒星族解释。
引用
@article{arxiv.2002.11117,
title = {Elevated ionizing photon production efficiency in faint high-equivalent-width Lyman-alpha emitters},
author = {Michael V. Maseda and Roland Bacon and Daniel Lam and Jorryt Matthee and Jarle Brinchmann and Joop Schaye and Ivo Labbe and Kasper B. Schmidt and Leindert Boogaard and Rychard Bouwens and Sebastiano Cantalupo and Marijn Franx and Takuya Hashimoto and Hanae Inami and Haruka Kusakabe and Guillaume Mahler and Themiya Nanayakkara and Johan Richard and Lutz Wisotzki},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2002.11117},
year = {2020}
}
备注
12 Pages, 6 Figures; Accepted for publication in MNRAS