The Intrinsic Distribution of Lyman-$\alpha$ Halos

Abstract

The emission and escape of Lyman-$\alpha$ photons from star-forming galaxies is determined through complex interactions between the emitted photons and a galaxy's interstellar and circumgalactic gas, causing Lyman-$\alpha$ emitters (LAEs) to commonly appear not as point sources but in spatially extended halos with complex spectral profiles. We develop a 3D spatial-spectral model of Lyman-$\alpha$ halos (LAHs) to replicate LAH observations in integral field spectroscopic studies, such as those made with VLT/MUSE. The profile of this model is a function of 6 key halo properties: the halo- and compact-source exponential scale lengths ($r_{sH}$ and $r_{sC}$), the halo flux fraction ($f_H$), the compact component ellipticity ($q$), the spectral line width ($\sigma$), and the spectral line skewness parameter ($\gamma$). Placing a series of model LAHs into datacubes reflecting observing conditions in the MUSE UDF-Mosaic survey, we test their detection recoverability and determine that $\sigma$, $r_{sH}$, and $f_H$ are expected to have the most significant effect on the detectability of the overall LAH at a given central wavelength and intrinsic line luminosity. We develop a general selection function model spanning a grid of these halo parameters, and with a sample of 145 UDF-Mosaic LAHs with measured halo properties, we derive completeness-corrected, intrinsic distributions of the values of $\sigma$, $r_{sH}$, and $f_H$ for $3<z<5$ LAHs. We present best-fit functional forms of the distributions, and a $\sigma$ distribution corrected for instrumental line-spread function (LSF) broadening, and thereby show the physical line spread distribution of the intrinsic population. Finally, we discuss implications of these distributions for Ly$\alpha$ emission through the circumgalactic medium, finding that observations undercount LAHs with extended halo scale lengths compared to the intrinsic population.

16 pages, 10 figures, accepted in A&A

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Cited by in corpus (2)

• Prospects for detecting cosmic filaments in Lyman-alpha emission across redshifts $z=2-5$
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