No Arabic abstract
Utilizing high-resolution cosmological hydrodynamic simulations we investigate various ultra-violet absorption lines in the circumgalactic medium of star forming galaxies at low redshift, in hopes of checking and alleviating the claimed observational conundrum of the ratio of NV to OVI absorbers, among others. We find a satisfactory agreement between simulations and extant observational data with respect to the ratios of the following four line pairs examined, NV/OVI, SiIV/OVI, NIII/OVI and NII/OVI. For the pairs involving nitrogen lines, we examine two cases of nitrogen abundance, one with constant N/O ratio and the other with varying N/O ratio, with the latter motivated by theoretical considerations of two different synthetic sources of nitrogen that is empirically verified independently. Along a separate vector, for all line pairs, we examine two cases of radiation field, one with the Haardt-Madau background radiation field and the other with an additional local radiation field sourced by hot gas in the host galaxy. In all cases, two-sample Kolmogorov-Smirnov tests indicate excellent agreements. We find that the apparent agreements between simulations and observations will be strongly tested, if the bulk of current upper limits of various line ratios are turned into actual detections. We show that an increase in observational sensitivity by 0.2 dex will already start to significantly constrain the models.
We examine the properties of the low-redshift circumgalactic medium (CGM) around star-forming and quenched galaxies in the Simba cosmological hydrodynamic simulations, focusing on comparing HI and metal line absorption to observations from the COS-Halos and COS-Dwarfs surveys. Halo baryon fractions are generally $lesssim 50%$ of the cosmic fraction due to stellar feedback at low masses, and jet-mode AGN feedback at high masses. Baryons and metals in the CGM of quenched galaxies are $gtrsim 90%$ hot gas, while the CGM of star-forming galaxies is more multi-phase. Hot CGM gas has low metallicity, while warm and cool CGM gas have metallicity close to that of galactic gas. Equivalent widths, covering fractions and total path absorption of HI and selected metal lines (MgII, SiIII, CIV and OVI) around a matched sample of Simba star-forming galaxies are mostly consistent with COS-Halos and COS-Dwarfs observations to $lesssim 0.4$~dex, depending on ion and assumed ionising background. Around matched quenched galaxies, absorption in all ions is lower, with HI absorption significantly under-predicted. Metal-line absorption is sensitive to choice of photo-ionising background; assuming recent backgrounds, Simba matches OVI but under-predicts low ions, while an older background matches low ions but under-predicts OVI. Simba reproduces the observed dichotomy of OVI absorption around star forming and quenched galaxies. CGM metals primarily come from stellar feedback, while jet-mode AGN feedback reduces absorption particularly for lower ions.
We analyze new far-ultraviolet spectra of 13 quasars from the z~0.2 COS-Halos survey that cover the HI Lyman limit of 14 circumgalactic medium (CGM) systems. These data yield precise estimates or more constraining limits than previous COS-Halos measurements on the HI column densities NHI. We then apply a Monte-Carlo Markov Chain approach on 32 systems from COS-Halos to estimate the metallicity of the cool (T~10^4K) CGM gas that gives rise to low-ionization state metal lines, under the assumption of photoionization equilibrium with the extragalactic UV background. The principle results are: (1) the CGM of field L* galaxies exhibits a declining HI surface density with impact parameter Rperp (at >99.5%$ confidence), (2) the transmission of ionizing radiation through CGM gas alone is 70+/-7%; (3) the metallicity distribution function of the cool CGM is unimodal with a median of 1/3 Z_Sun and a 95% interval from ~1/50 Z_Sun to over 3x solar. The incidence of metal poor (<1/100 Z_Sun) gas is low, implying any such gas discovered along quasar sightlines is typically unrelated to L* galaxies; (4) we find an unexpected increase in gas metallicity with declining NHI (at >99.9% confidence) and, therefore, also with increasing Rperp. The high metallicity at large radii implies early enrichment; (5) A non-parametric estimate of the cool CGM gas mass is M_CGM_cool = 9.2 +/- 4.3 10^10 Msun, which together with new mass estimates for the hot CGM may resolve the galactic missing baryons problem. Future analyses of halo gas should focus on the underlying astrophysics governing the CGM, rather than processes that simply expel the medium from the halo.
We measure the scale dependence and redshift dependence of 21 cm line emitted from the neutral hydrogen gas at redshift 1<z<5 using full cosmological hydrodynamic simulations by taking the ratios between the power spectra of HI-dark matter cross correlation and dark matter auto-correlation. The neutral hydrogen distribution is computed in full cosmological hydrodynamic simulations including star formation and supernova feedback under a uniform ultra-violet background radiation. We find a significant scale dependence of HI bias at z>3 on scales of k>1h/Mpc, but it is roughly constant at lower redshift z<3. The redshift evolution of HI bias is relatively slow compared to that of QSOs at similar redshift range. We also measure a redshift space distortion (RSD) of HI gas to explore the properties of HI clustering. Fitting to a widely applied theoretical prediction, we find that the constant bias is consistent with that measured directly from the real-space power spectra, and the velocity dispersion is marginally consistent with the linear perturbation prediction. Finally we compare the results obtained from our simulation and the Illustris simulation, and conclude that the detailed astrophysical effects do not affect the scale dependence of HI bias very much, which implies that the cosmological analysis using 21 cm line of HI will be robust against the uncertainties arising from small-scale astrophysical processes such as star formation and supernova feedback.
We simulate the flux emitted from galaxy halos in order to quantify the brightness of the circumgalactic medium (CGM). We use dedicated zoom-in cosmological simulations with the hydrodynamical Adaptive Mesh Refinement code RAMSES, which are evolved down to z=0 and reach a maximum spatial resolution of 380 $h^{-1}$pc and a gas mass resolution up to 1.8$times 10^{5} h^{-1} rm{M}_{odot}$ in the densest regions. We compute the expected emission from the gas in the CGM using CLOUDY emissivity models for different lines (e.g. Ly$alpha$, CIV, OVI, CVI, OVIII) considering UV background fluorescence, gravitational cooling and continuum emission. In the case of Ly$alpha$ we additionally consider the scattering of continuum photons. We compare our predictions to current observations and find them to be in good agreement at any redshift after adjusting the Ly$alpha$ escape fraction. We combine our mock observations with instrument models for FIREBall-2 (UV balloon spectrograph) and HARMONI (visible and NIR IFU on the ELT) to predict CGM observations with either instrument and optimise target selections and observing strategies. Our results show that Ly$alpha$ emission from the CGM at a redshift of 0.7 will be observable with FIREBall-2 for bright galaxies (NUV$sim$18 mag), while metal lines like OVI and CIV will remain challenging to detect. HARMONI is found to be well suited to study the CGM at different redshifts with various tracers.
We use the EAGLE (Evolution and Assembly of GaLaxies and their Environments) cosmological simulation to study the distribution of baryons, and far-ultraviolet (O VI), extreme-ultraviolet (Ne VIII) and X-ray (O VII, O VIII, Ne IX, and Fe XVII) line absorbers, around galaxies and haloes of mass $mathrm{M}_{200c}=10^{11}$-$10^{14.5},mathrm{M}_{odot}$ at redshift 0.1. EAGLE predicts that the circumgalactic medium (CGM) contains more metals than the interstellar medium across halo masses. The ions we study here trace the warm-hot, volume-filling phase of the CGM, but are biased towards temperatures corresponding to the collisional ionization peak for each ion, and towards high metallicities. Gas well within the virial radius is mostly collisionally ionized, but around and beyond this radius, and for O VI, photoionization becomes significant. When presenting observables we work with column densities, but quantify their relation with equivalent widths by analysing virtual spectra. Virial-temperature collisional ionization equilibrium ion fractions are good predictors of column density trends with halo mass, but underestimate the diversity of ions in haloes. Halo gas dominates the highest column density absorption for X-ray lines, but lower density gas contributes to strong UV absorption lines from O VI and Ne VIII. Of the O VII (O VIII) absorbers detectable in an Athena X-IFU blind survey, we find that 41 (56) per cent arise from haloes with $mathrm{M}_{200c}=10^{12.0}$-$10^{13.5},mathrm{M}_{odot}$. We predict that the X-IFU will detect O VII (O VIII) in 77 (46) per cent of the sightlines passing $mathrm{M}_{star}=10^{10.5}$-$10^{11.0},mathrm{M}_{odot}$ galaxies within 100 pkpc (59 (82) per cent for $mathrm{M}_{star}>10^{11.0},mathrm{M}_{odot}$). Hence, the X-IFU will probe covering fractions comparable to those detected with the Cosmic Origins Spectrograph for O VI.