The Low-redshift Lyman Continuum Survey. I. New, Diverse Local Lyman Continuum Emitters

Creators: Flury, Sophia R.; Jaskot, Anne E.; Ferguson, Harry C.; Worseck, Gábor; Makan, Kirill; Chisholm, John; Saldana-Lopez, Alberto; Schaerer, Daniel; McCandliss, Stephan; Wang, Bingjie; Ford, N. M.; Heckman, Timothy; Ji, Zhiyuan; Giavalisco, Mauro; Amorin, Ricardo; Atek, Hakim; Blaizot, Jeremy; Borthakur, Sanchayeeta; Carr, Cody; Castellano, Marco; Cristiani, Stefano; De Barros, Stephane; Dickinson, Mark; Finkelstein, Steven L.; Fleming, Brian; Fontanot, Fabio; Garel, Thibault; Grazian, Andrea; Hayes, Matthew; Henry, Alaina; Mauerhofer, Valentin; Micheva, Genoveva; Oey, M. S.; Ostlin, Goran; Papovich, Casey; Pentericci, Laura; Ravindranath, Swara; Rosdahl, Joakim; Rutkowski, Michael; Santini, Paola; Scarlata, Claudia; Teplitz, Harry; Thuan, Trinh; Trebitsch, Maxime; Vanzella, Eros; Verhamme, Anne; Xu, Xinfeng

Abstract

The origins of Lyman continuum (LyC) photons responsible for the reionization of the universe are as of yet unknown and highly contested. Detecting LyC photons from the Epoch of Reionization is not possible due to absorption by the intergalactic medium, which has prompted the development of several indirect diagnostics to infer the rate at which galaxies contribute LyC photons to reionize the universe by studying lower-redshift analogs. We present the Low-redshift Lyman Continuum Survey (LzLCS) comprising measurements made with the Hubble Space Telescope Cosmic Origins Spectrograph for a z = 0.2–0.4 sample of 66 galaxies. After careful processing of the far-UV spectra, we obtain a total of 35 Lyman continuum emitters (LCEs) detected with 97.725% confidence, nearly tripling the number of known local LCEs. We estimate escape fractions from the detected LyC flux and upper limits on the undetected LyC flux, finding a range of LyC escape fractions up to 50%. Of the 35 LzLCS LCEs, 12 have LyC escape fractions greater than 5%, more than doubling the number of known local LCEs with cosmologically relevant LyC escape.

Additional Information

© 2022. The Author(s). Published by the American Astronomical Society. Original content from this work may be used under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 licence. Any further distribution of this work must maintain attribution to the author(s) and the title of the work, journal citation and DOI. Received 2021 August 5; revised 2021 December 14; accepted 2022 January 7; published 2022 April 21. We thank the anonymous referee for feedback that improved the clarity of this paper. Support for this work was provided by NASA through grant No. HST-GO-15626 from the Space Telescope Science Institute. Additional work was based on observations made with the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope, obtained from the data archive at the Space Telescope Science Institute from HST proposals 13744, 14635, 15341, and 15639. STScI is operated by the Association of Universities for Research in Astronomy, Inc. under NASA contract NAS 5-26555. Funding for the Sloan Digital Sky Survey IV has been provided by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, the U.S. Department of Energy Office of Science, and the Participating Institutions. SDSS-IV acknowledges support and resources from the Center for High Performance Computing at the University of Utah. The SDSS website is www.sdss.org. SDSS-IV is managed by the Astrophysical Research Consortium for the Participating Institutions of the SDSS Collaboration. R.A. acknowledges support from ANID Fondecyt Regular 1202007. Software: astropy (Astropy Collaboration et al. 2013, 2018), bpass (Stanway & Eldridge 2018), calcos, Cloudy (Ferland et al. 2013), emcee (Foreman-Mackey et al. 2013), FaintCOS (Worseck et al. 2016; Makan et al. 2021), matplotlib (Hunter 2007), numpy (van der Walt et al. 2011), Prospector (Leja et al. 2017; Johnson et al. 2019), pyneb (Luridiana et al. 2015), scipy (Virtanen et al. 2020), Starburst99 (Leitherer et al. 1999, 2010, 2014).

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