Environmental Dependence of Galactic Properties Traced by Ly$alpha$ Forest Absorption: Diversity among Galaxy Populations


الملخص بالإنكليزية

In order to shed light on how galactic properties depend on the intergalactic medium (IGM) environment traced by the Ly$alpha$ forest, we observationally investigate the IGM-galaxy connection using the publicly available 3D IGM tomography data (CLAMATO) and several galaxy catalogs in the COSMOS field. We measure the cross-correlation function (CCF) for $570$ galaxies with spec-$z$ measurements and detect a correlation with the IGM up to $50$ $h^{-1}$ comoving Mpc. We show that galaxies with stellar masses of $10^9-10^{10}$ M$_odot$ are the dominant contributor to the total CCF signal. We also investigate CCFs for several galaxy populations: Ly$alpha$ emitters (LAEs), H$alpha$ emitters (HAEs), [OIII] emitters (O3Es), active galactic nuclei (AGNs), and submillimeter galaxies (SMGs), and we detect the highest signal in AGNs and SMGs at large scales ($rgeq5$ $h^{-1}$ Mpc), but in LAEs at small scales ($r<5$ $h^{-1}$ Mpc). We find that they live in various IGM environments -- HAEs trace the IGM in a similar manner to the continuum-selected galaxies, but LAEs and O3Es tend to reside in higher-density regions. Additionally, LAEs CCF is flat up to $rsim3$ $h^{-1}$ Mpc, indicating that they tend to avoid the highest-density regions. For AGNs and SMGs, the CCF peak at $r=5-6$ $h^{-1}$ Mpc implies that they tend to be in locally lower-density regions. We suspect that it is due to the photoionization of IGM HI by AGNs, i.e., the proximity effect.

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