Exploring HeII$\lambda$1640 emission line properties at $z\sim 2-4$

Abstract

Deep optical spectroscopic surveys of galaxies provide us a unique opportunity to investigate rest-frame ultra-violet (UV) emission line properties of galaxies at $z\sim 2-4.5$. Here we combine VLT/MUSE Guaranteed Time Observations of the Hubble Deep Field South, Ultra Deep Field, COSMOS, and several quasar fields with other publicly available data from VLT/VIMOS and VLT/FORS2 to construct a catalogue of HeII$\lambda$1640 emitters at $z\sim 2$. The deepest areas of our MUSE pointings reach a $3\sigma$ line flux limit of 3.1$\times$10-19 erg/ s/ cm${}^2$. After discarding broad line active galactic nuclei we find 13 HeII$\lambda$1640 detections from MUSE with a median MUV = $-20.1$ and 21 tentative HeII$\lambda$1640 detections from other public surveys. Excluding Ly$\alpha$, all except two galaxies in our sample show at least one other rest-UV emission line, with CIII]$\lambda$1907,$\lambda$1909 being the most prominent. We use multi-wavelength data available in the Hubble legacy fields to derive basic galaxy properties of our sample via spectral energy distribution fitting techniques. Taking advantage of the high quality spectra obtained by MUSE ($\sim 10-30$h of exposure time per pointing), we use photo-ionisation models to study the rest-UV emission line diagnostics of the HeII$\lambda$1640 emitters. Line ratios of our sample can be reproduced by moderately sub-solar photo-ionisation models, however, we find that including effects of binary stars lead to degeneracies in most free parameters. Even after considering extra ionising photons produced by extreme sub-solar metallicity binary stellar models, photo-ionisation models are unable to reproduce rest-frame HeII$\lambda$1640 equivalent widths ($\sim$ 0.2 - 10 A), thus additional mechanisms are necessary in models to match the observed HeII$\lambda$1640 properties.

Accepted to A&A, 31 pages, 17 figures

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