English

Resolving Clumpy vs. Extended Ly-$\alpha$ In Strongly Lensed, High-Redshift Ly-$\alpha$ Emitters

Astrophysics of Galaxies 2023-12-06 v1

Abstract

We present six strongly gravitationally lensed Ly-α\alpha Emitters (LAEs) at z45z\sim4-5 with HST narrowband imaging isolating Ly-α\alpha. Through complex radiative transfer Ly-α\alpha encodes information about the spatial distribution and kinematics of the neutral hydrogen upon which it scatters. We investigate the galaxy properties and Ly-α\alpha morphologies of our sample. Many previous studies of high-redshift LAEs have been limited in Ly-α\alpha spatial resolution. In this work we take advantage of high-resolution Ly-α\alpha imaging boosted by lensing magnification, allowing us to probe sub-galactic scales that are otherwise inaccessible at these redshifts. We use broadband imaging from HST (rest-frame UV) and Spitzer (rest-frame optical) in SED fitting; providing estimates on the stellar masses (108109M\sim 10^8 - 10^9 M_{\odot}), stellar population ages (t50<40t_{50} <40 Myr), and amounts of dust (AV0.10.6A_V \sim 0.1 - 0.6, statistically consistent with zero). We employ non-parametric star-formation histories to probe the young stellar-populations which create Ly-α\alpha. We also examine the offsets between the Ly-α\alpha and stellar continuum, finding small upper limits of offsets (<0.1"< 0.1") consistent with studies of low-redshift LAEs; indicating our galaxies are not interacting or merging. Finally, we find a bimodality in our sample's Ly-α\alpha morphologies: clumpy and extended. We find a suggestive trend: our LAEs with clumpy Ly-α\alpha are generally younger than the LAEs with extended Ly-α\alpha, suggesting a possible correlation with age.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2312.02336,
  title  = {Resolving Clumpy vs. Extended Ly-$\alpha$ In Strongly Lensed, High-Redshift Ly-$\alpha$ Emitters},
  author = {Alexander Navarre and Gourav Khullar and Matthew Bayliss and Håkon Dahle and Michael Florian and Michael Gladders and Keunho Kim and Riley Owens and Jane Rigby and Joshua Roberson and Keren Sharon and Takatoshi Shibuya and Ryan Walker},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2312.02336},
  year   = {2023}
}

Comments

17 pages (2 for references), 5 figures, 6 tables

R2 v1 2026-06-28T13:41:02.208Z