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Register a new userEvidence for Large Scale Structure in the Lyman alpha Forest at z>2.6
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We present a search for spatial and redshift correlations in a 2 A resolution spectroscopic survey of the Lyman alpha forest at 2.15 < z < 3.37 toward ten QSOs concentrated within a 1-degree diameter field. We find a signal at 2.7 sigma significance for correlations of the Lyman alpha absorption line wavelengths between different lines of sight over the whole redshift range. The significance rises to 3.2 sigma if we restrict the redshift range to 2.60 < z < 3.37, and to 4.0 sigma if we further restrict the sample to lines with rest equivalent width 0.1 <= W0/(A) < 0.9. We conclude that a significant fraction of the Lyman alpha forest arises in structures whose correlation length extends at least over 30 arcmin (~26/h comoving Mpc at z=2.6 for H0 = 100h km/s/Mpc, Omega=1.0, Lambda=0). We have also calculated the three dimensional two point correlation function for Lyman alpha absorbers; we do not detect any significant signal in the data. However, we note that line blending prevents us from detecting the signal produced by a 100% overdensity of Lyman alpha absorbers in simulated data. We find that the Lyman alpha forest redshift distribution provides a more sensitive test for such clustering than the three dimensional two point correlation function.
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We present the first observations of foreground Lyman-$alpha$ forest absorption from high-redshift galaxies, targeting 24 star-forming galaxies (SFGs) with $zsim 2.3-2.8$ within a $5 times 15$ region of the COSMOS field. The transverse sightline separation is $sim 2,h^{-1}mathrm{Mpc}$ comoving, allowing us to create a tomographic reconstruction of the 3D Ly$alpha$ forest absorption field over the redshift range $2.20leq zleq 2.45$. The resulting map covers $6,h^{-1}mathrm{Mpc} times 14,h^{-1}mathrm{Mpc}$ in the transverse plane and $230,h^{-1}mathrm{Mpc}$ along the line-of-sight with a spatial resolution of $approx 3.5,h^{-1}mathrm{Mpc}$, and is the first high-fidelity map of large-scale structure on $simmathrm{Mpc}$ scales at $z>2$. Our map reveals significant structures with $gtrsim 10,h^{-1}mathrm{Mpc}$ extent, including several spanning the entire transverse breadth, providing qualitative evidence for the filamentary structures predicted to exist in the high-redshift cosmic web. Simulated reconstructions with the same sightline sampling, spectral resolution, and signal-to-noise ratio recover the salient structures present in the underlying 3D absorption fields. Using data from other surveys, we identified 18 galaxies with known redshifts coeval with our map volume enabling a direct comparison to our tomographic map. This shows that galaxies preferentially occupy high-density regions, in qualitative agreement with the same comparison applied to simulations. Our results establishes the feasibility of the CLAMATO survey, which aims to obtain Ly$alpha$ forest spectra for $sim 1000$ SFGs over $sim 1 ,mathrm{deg}^2$ of the COSMOS field, in order to map out IGM large-scale structure at $langle z rangle sim 2.3$ over a large volume $(100,h^{-1}mathrm{Mpc})^3$.
The amplitude of fluctuations in the Ly-a forest on small spatial scales is sensitive to the temperature of the IGM and its spatial fluctuations. The temperature of the IGM and its spatial variations contain important information about hydrogen and helium reionization. We present a new measurement of the small-scale structure in the Ly-a forest from 40 high resolution, high signal-to-noise, VLT spectra at z=2.2-4.2. We convolve each Ly-a forest spectrum with a suitably chosen wavelet filter, which allows us to extract the amount of small-scale structure in the forest as a function of position across each spectrum. We compare these measurements with high resolution hydrodynamic simulations of the Ly-a forest which track more than 2 billion particles. This comparison suggests that the IGM temperature close to the cosmic mean density (T_0) peaks near z=3.4, at which point it is greater than 20,000 K at 2-sigma confidence. The temperature at lower redshift is consistent with the fall-off expected from adiabatic cooling ($T_0 propto (1+z)^2$), after the peak temperature is reached near z=3.4. At z=4.2 our results favor a temperature of T_0 = 15-20,000 K. However, owing mostly to uncertainties in the mean transmitted flux at this redshift, a cooler IGM model with T_0 = 10,000 K is only disfavored at the 2-sigma level here, although such cool IGM models are strongly discrepant with the z ~ 3-3.4 measurement. We do not detect large spatial fluctuations in the IGM temperature at any redshift covered by our data set. The simplest interpretation of our measurements is that HeII reionization completes sometime near z ~ 3.4, although statistical uncertainties are still large [Abridged].
This work presents a new physically-motivated supervised machine learning method, Hydro-BAM, to reproduce the three-dimensional Lyman-$alpha$ forest field in real and in redshift space learning from a reference hydrodynamic simulation, thereby saving about 7 orders of magnitude in computing time. We show that our method is accurate up to $ksim1,h,rm{Mpc}^{-1}$ in the one- (PDF), two- (power-spectra) and three-point (bi-spectra) statistics of the reconstructed fields. When compared to the reference simulation including redshift space distortions, our method achieves deviations of $lesssim2%$ up to $k=0.6,h,rm{Mpc}^{-1}$ in the monopole, $lesssim5%$ up to $k=0.9,h,rm{Mpc}^{-1}$ in the quadrupole. The bi-spectrum is well reproduced for triangle configurations with sides up to $k=0.8,h,rm{Mpc}^{-1}$. In contrast, the commonly-adopted Fluctuating Gunn-Peterson approximation shows significant deviations already neglecting peculiar motions at configurations with sides of $k=0.2-0.4,h,rm{Mpc}^{-1}$ in the bi-spectrum, being also significantly less accurate in the power-spectrum (within 5$%$ up to $k=0.7,h,rm{Mpc}^{-1}$). We conclude that an accurate analysis of the Lyman-$alpha$ forest requires considering the complex baryonic thermodynamical large-scale structure relations. Our hierarchical domain specific machine learning method can efficiently exploit this and is ready to generate accurate Lyman-$alpha$ forest mock catalogues covering large volumes required by surveys such as DESI and WEAVE.
We present the analysis of a sample of the Ly-$alpha$ forest spectra of 152 quasars taken with the HST FOS. The Ly-$alpha$ lines show little evolution at $0<z<1.7$. We see a difference between the evolution indices for weak and strong lines.
We present the results of a high-spatial-resolution study of the line emission in a sample of z=3.1 Lyman-Alpha-Emitting Galaxies (LAEs) in the Extended Chandra Deep Field-South. Of the eight objects with coverage in our HST/WFPC2 narrow-band imaging, two have clear detections and an additional two are barely detected (~2-sigma). The clear detections are within ~0.5 kpc of the centroid of the corresponding rest-UV continuum source, suggesting that the line-emitting gas and young stars in LAEs are spatially coincident. The brightest object exhibits extended emission with a half-light radius of ~1.5 kpc, but a stack of the remaining LAE surface brightness profiles is consistent with the WFPC2 point spread function. This suggests that the Lyman Alpha emission in these objects originates from a compact (<~2 kpc) region and cannot be significantly more extended than the far-UV continuum emission (<~1 kpc). Comparing our WFPC2 photometry to previous ground-based measurements of their monochromatic fluxes, we find at 95% (99.7%) confidence that we cannot be missing more than 22% (32%) of the Lyman Alpha emission.
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