The Environmental Impact of Lyman-break Galaxies

Abstract

We perform cosmological simulations of galaxies forming at z=3 using the hydrodynamics grid code, Enzo. By selecting the largest galaxies in the volume to correspond to Lyman-break galaxies, we construct observational spectra of the HI flux distribution around these objects, as well as column densities of CIV and OVI throughout a refined region. We successfully reproduce the most recent observations of the mean HI flux in the close vicinity of Lyman-break galaxies but see no evidence for the proximity effect in earlier observations. While our galaxies do return metals to the IGM, their quantity and volume appears to be somewhat less than observed. We conclude that either we do not adequately resolve galactic winds, or that at least some of the intergalactic metal enrichment is by early epoch objects whose mass is smaller than our minimum resolved halo mass.

arXiv commentTo be published in ApJL, in press. 4 pages, 4 figures; added references to work by Ferrara to sections 1 and 3.2

References in corpus (18)

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• Confronting cosmological simulations with observations of intergalactic metals
• High redshift galaxies and the Lyman-alpha forest in a CDM universe
• Numerical Simulations of High Redshift Star Formation in Dwarf Galaxies
• Galactic Wind Effects on the Lyman-alpha Absorption in the Vicinity of Galaxies
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Cited by in corpus (6)

• The Effect of the Interstellar Model on Star Formation Properties in Galactic Disks
• Galactic Wind Signatures around High Redshift Galaxies
• Effects of metal enrichment and metal cooling in galaxy growth and cosmic star formation history
• A measurement of galaxy halo mass from the surrounding HI Lyα absorption
• Clustering Properties of restframe UV selected galaxies II: Migration of Star Formation sites with cosmic time from GALEX and CFHTLS
• X-ray stacking of Lyman break galaxies in the 4\,Ms CDF-S - X-ray luminosities and star formation rates across cosmic time