Linking gas and galaxies at high redshift: MUSE surveys the environments of six damped Lyα systems at z ≈ 3

Mackenzie, Ruari ; Fumagalli, Michele ; Theuns, Tom ; Hatton, David J ; Garel, Thibault ; Cantalupo, Sebastiano ; Christensen, Lise ; Fynbo, Johan P U ; Kanekar, Nissim ; Møller, Palle ; O’Meara, John ; Prochaska, J Xavier ; Rafelski, Marc ; Shanks, Tom ; Trayford, James (2019) Linking gas and galaxies at high redshift: MUSE surveys the environments of six damped Lyα systems at z ≈ 3 Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society, 487 (4). pp. 5070-5096. ISSN 0035-8711

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Official URL: http://doi.org/10.1093/mnras/stz1501

Related URL: http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/mnras/stz1501

Abstract

We present results from a survey of galaxies in the fields of six z>3 Damped Lyman alpha systems (DLAs) using the Multi Unit Spectroscopic Explorer (MUSE) at the Very Large Telescope (VLT). We report a high detection rate of up to ~80% of galaxies within 1000 km/s from DLAs and with impact parameters between 25 and 280 kpc. In particular, we discovered 5 high-confidence Lyman alpha emitters associated with three DLAs, plus up to 9 additional detections across five of the six fields. The majority of the detections are at relatively large impact parameters (>50 kpc) with two detections being plausible host galaxies. Among our detections, we report four galaxies associated with the most metal-poor DLA in our sample (Z/Zsun = -2.33), which trace an overdense structure resembling a filament. By comparing our detections with predictions from the Evolution and Assembly of GaLaxies and their Environments (EAGLE) cosmological simulations and a semi-analytic model designed to reproduce the observed bias of DLAs at z>2, we conclude that our observations are consistent with a scenario in which a significant fraction of DLAs trace the neutral regions within halos with a characteristic mass of 1011-1012 Msun, in agreement with the inference made from the large-scale clustering of DLAs. We finally show how larger surveys targeting ~25 absorbers have the potential of constraining the characteristic masses of halos hosting high-redshift DLAs with sufficient accuracy to discriminate between different models.

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Deposited On:12 May 2021 07:09
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