Lyα Emission from High-redshift Sources in COSMOS

Abstract

We investigate spectroscopically measured Lyα equivalent widths (EWs) and escape fractions of 244 sources of which 95 are Lyman break galaxies (LBGs) and 106 Lyman alpha emitters (LAEs) at z ~ 4.2, z ~ 4.8, and z ~ 5.6 selected from intermediate and narrowband observations. The sources were selected from the Cosmic Evolution Survey and observed with the DEIMOS spectrograph. We find that the distribution of EWs shows no evolution with redshift for both the LBG selected sources and the intermediate/narrowband LAEs. We also find that the Lyα escape fraction of intermediate/narrowband LAEs is on average higher and has a larger variation than the escape fraction of LBG selected sources. The escape fraction does not show a dependence with redshift. Similar to what has been found for LAEs at low redshifts, the sources with the highest extinctions show the lowest escape fractions. The range of escape fractions increases with decreasing extinction. This is evidence that the dust extinction is the most important factor affecting the escape of Lyα photons, but at low extinctions other factors, such as the H I covering fraction and gas kinematics, can be just as effective at inhibiting the escape of Lyα photons.

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