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Published August 2013 | Submitted + Published
Journal Article Open

A measurement of galaxy halo mass from the surrounding H i Lyα absorption

Abstract

We measure the dark matter halo masses of 〈z〉 ≈ 2.36 UV colour-selected star-forming galaxies by matching the observed median H I Lyα absorption around them, as observed in the spectra of background QSOs, to the absorption around haloes above a given mass in cosmological simulations. Focusing on transverse separations 0–2 proper Mpc (pMpc) and line-of-sight separations 154–616 km s^(−1), we find a minimum halo mass of log_(10)M_(min)/M⊙ = 11.6 ± 0.2, which is in good agreement with published halo mass estimates from clustering analyses. We verified that the measured halo mass is insensitive to a change in the cosmological parameters (Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe 1 versus Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe 3) and to the inclusion of strong AGN feedback. One unique strength of this method is that it can be used in narrow field galaxy–QSO surveys, i.e. ≈30 × 30 arcsec. In addition, we find that the observed anisotropy in the 2D H I Lyα absorption distribution on scales of 1.5–2 pMpc is consistent with being a consequence of large-scale gas infall into the potential wells occupied by galaxies.

Additional Information

© 2013 The Authors. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the Royal Astronomical Society. Accepted 2013 May 30. Received 2013 May 29; in original form 2012 October 5. First published online: June 29, 2013. The authors would like to thank all the members of the OWLS team for useful discussions and the anonymous referee whose suggestions have improved the clarity of the paper. The simulations presented here were run on Stella, the LOFAR BlueGene/L system in Groningen, on the Cosmology Machine at the Institute for Computational Cosmology in Durham (which is part of the DiRAC Facility jointly funded by STFC, the Large Facilities Capital Fund of BIS and Durham University) as part of the Virgo Consortium research programme and on Darwin in Cambridge. This work was sponsored by the National Computing Facilities Foundation (NCF) for the use of supercomputer facilities, with financial support from the Netherlands Organization for Scientific Research (NWO), also through a VIDI grant. The research leading to these results has received funding from the European Research Council under the European Union's Seventh Framework Programme (FP7/2007- 2013)/ERC Grant agreement 278594-GasAroundGalaxies and from the Marie Curie Training Network CosmoComp (PITN-GA-2009- 238356).

Attached Files

Published - MNRAS-2013-Rakic-3103-14.pdf

Submitted - 1306.1563v1.pdf

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Created:
August 19, 2023
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October 24, 2023