Massive Warm/Hot Galaxy Coronae: II. Isentropic Model


Abstract in English

We construct a new analytic phenomenological model for the extended circumgalactic material (CGM) of $L^*$ galaxies. Our model reproduces the OVII/OVIII absorption observations of the Milky Way (MW) and the OVI measurements reported by the COS-Halos and eCGM surveys. The warm/hot gas is in hydrostatic equilibrium in a MW gravitational potential, and we adopt a barotropic equation of state, resulting in a temperature variation as a function of radius. A pressure component with an adiabatic index of $gamma=4/3$ is included to approximate the effects of a magnetic field and cosmic rays. We introduce a metallicity gradient motivated by the enrichment of the inner CGM by the Galaxy. We then present our fiducial model for the corona, tuned to reproduce the observed OVI-OVIII column densities, and with a total mass of $M_{rm gas} approx 5.5 times 10^{10}~{rm M_{odot}}$ inside $r_{rm cgm} approx 280$ kpc. The gas densities in the CGM are low ($n_{rm H} = 10^{-5} - 3 times 10^{-4}~{rm cm^{-3}}$) and its collisional ionization state is modified by the metagalactic radiation field (MGRF). We show that for OVI-bearing warm/hot gas with typical observed column densities $N_{rm OVI} sim 3 times 10^{14}~{rm cm^{-2}}$ at large ($gtrsim 100$ kpc) impact parameters from the central galaxies, the ratio of the cooling to dynamical times, $t_{rm cool}/t_{rm dyn}$, has a model-independent upper limit of $lesssim 4$. In our model, $t_{rm cool}/t_{rm dyn}$ at large radii is $sim 2-3$. We present predictions for a wide range of future observations of the warm/hot CGM, from UV/X-ray absorption and emission spectroscopy, to dispersion measure (DM) and Sunyaev-Zeldovich CMB measurements. We provide the model outputs in machine-readable data files, for easy comparison and analysis.

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