Environmental dependence of galactic properties traced by Ly$α$ forest absorption (II): diversity among galaxy populations [GA]

http://arxiv.org/abs/2002.07335


This is the second paper of a series to shed light on how galactic properties depend on the intergalactic medium (IGM) environment traced by the Ly$\alpha$ forest. In this paper, we observationally investigate the IGM–galaxy connection using the publicly available 3D IGM tomography data (CLAMATO: Lee et al. 2016, 2018) 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 detect the highest signal in AGNs and SMGs at large scales ($r\geq5$ $h^{-1}$ 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 $r\sim3$ $h^{-1}$ 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 IGM HI photoionization by AGNs, i.e., the proximity effect.

Read this paper on arXiv…

R. Momose, K. Shimasaku, N. Kashikawa, et. al.
Wed, 19 Feb 20
57/62

Comments: 25 pages, 16 figures, submitted to ApJ, any comments are welcome