TY - JOUR
T1 - Inspiraling halo accretion mapped in Ly α emission around a z ~ 3 quasar
AU - Battaia, Fabrizio Arrigoni
AU - Prochaska, J. Xavier
AU - Hennawi, Joseph F.
AU - Obreja, Aura
AU - Buck, Tobias
AU - Cantalupo, Sebastiano
AU - Dutton, Aaron A.
AU - Macciò, Andrea V.
N1 - Funding Information:
The authors thank the anonymous referee for the punctual comments and suggestions that help in improving the clarity of our manuscript. We thank H. Rahmani, A. De Cia, A. Zanella and F. Lelli for helpful discussions. We thank R. Ellis, R. Ivison and E. Emsellem for providing comments on an early version of this work. This paper is based on observations collected at the European Organization for Astronomical Research in the Southern hemisphere under ESO programmes 094.A-0585(A) and 096.A-0937(A) (PI: FAB). Simulations have been performed on the High Performance Computing resources at New York University, Abu Dhabi. JXP acknowledges support from the National Science Foundation through grant AST-1412981. AO has been funded by the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG; German Research Foundation)-MO 2979/1-1. TB acknowledges support from the Sonderforschungsbereich SFB 881 'The Milky Way System' (subproject A2) of the German Research Foundation (DFG). SC gratefully acknowledges support from the Swiss National Science Foundation grant PP00P2_163824. This work made use of Pynbody, an opensource analysis package for astrophysical N-body and Smooth Particle Hydrodynamics simulations (Pontzen et al. 2013). This work also made use of the KUBEVIZ software that is publicly available at http://www.mpe.mpg.de/~mfossati/kubeviz.
Publisher Copyright:
© 2016 The Authors.
PY - 2018/1
Y1 - 2018/1
N2 - In an effort to search for Ly α emission from circum- and intergalactic gas on scales of hundreds of kpc around z ~ 3 quasars, and thus characterize the physical properties of the gas in emission, we have initiated an extensive fast survey with the Multi-Unit Spectroscopic Explorer (MUSE): Quasar Snapshot Observations withMUse: Search for Extended Ultraviolet eMission (QSO MUSEUM). In this work, we report the discovery of an enormous Ly α nebula (ELAN) around the quasar SDSS J102009.99+104002.7 at z = 3.164, which we followedup with deeper MUSE observations. This ELAN spans ~297 projected kpc, has an average Ly α surface brightness SBLy α ~ 6.04 × 10-18 erg s-1 cm-2 arcsec-2(within the 2σ isophote) and is associated with an additional four previously unknown embedded sources: two Ly α emitters and two faint active galactic nuclei (one type-1 and one type-2 quasar). By mapping at high significance, the line-of-sight velocity in the entirety of the observed structure, we unveiled a large-scale coherent rotation-like pattern spanning ~300 km s-1 with a velocity dispersion of < 270 km s-1, which we interpret as a signature of the inspiraling accretion of substructures within the quasar's host halo. Future multiwavelength data will complement our MUSE observations and are definitely needed to fully characterize such a complex system. None the less, our observations reveal the potential of newsensitive integral-field spectrographs to characterize the dynamical state of diffuse gas on large scales in the young Universe, and thereby witness the assembly of galaxies.
AB - In an effort to search for Ly α emission from circum- and intergalactic gas on scales of hundreds of kpc around z ~ 3 quasars, and thus characterize the physical properties of the gas in emission, we have initiated an extensive fast survey with the Multi-Unit Spectroscopic Explorer (MUSE): Quasar Snapshot Observations withMUse: Search for Extended Ultraviolet eMission (QSO MUSEUM). In this work, we report the discovery of an enormous Ly α nebula (ELAN) around the quasar SDSS J102009.99+104002.7 at z = 3.164, which we followedup with deeper MUSE observations. This ELAN spans ~297 projected kpc, has an average Ly α surface brightness SBLy α ~ 6.04 × 10-18 erg s-1 cm-2 arcsec-2(within the 2σ isophote) and is associated with an additional four previously unknown embedded sources: two Ly α emitters and two faint active galactic nuclei (one type-1 and one type-2 quasar). By mapping at high significance, the line-of-sight velocity in the entirety of the observed structure, we unveiled a large-scale coherent rotation-like pattern spanning ~300 km s-1 with a velocity dispersion of < 270 km s-1, which we interpret as a signature of the inspiraling accretion of substructures within the quasar's host halo. Future multiwavelength data will complement our MUSE observations and are definitely needed to fully characterize such a complex system. None the less, our observations reveal the potential of newsensitive integral-field spectrographs to characterize the dynamical state of diffuse gas on large scales in the young Universe, and thereby witness the assembly of galaxies.
KW - Cosmology: observations
KW - Galaxies: haloes
KW - Galaxies: high-redshift
KW - Intergalactic medium
KW - Quasars: emission lines
KW - Quasars: general
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U2 - 10.1093/mnras/stx2465
DO - 10.1093/mnras/stx2465
M3 - Article
AN - SCOPUS:85042388058
SN - 0035-8711
VL - 473
SP - 3907
EP - 3940
JO - Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society
JF - Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society
IS - 3
ER -