Lyman-alpha radiative transfer through outflowing halo models to understand both the observed spectra and surface brightness profiles of Lyman-alpha halos around high-z star-forming galaxies

  • Published : 2018.05.08

Abstract

With a recent observational study of extended Lyman-alpha halos around individual high-z star-forming galaxies by Leclercq et al. (2017) using MUSE, we perform radiative transfer calculations to see if Lyman-alpha scattering can explain the spatial extents of the halos together with their spectra. We adopt a spherically-symmetric halo model in which Lyman-alpha sources and neutral hydrogen (HI) medium have exponential density distributions. The HI medium is set to have outflowing motion based on a momentum-driven wind scenario in a gravitational potential well. We run our Lyman-alpha radiative transfer code, LaRT, upon this halo model for various sets of parameters regarding the HI medium such as temperature, optical depth, density scale radius, outflow velocities, and dust content. We analyze simulation results to see the impact of each parameter on Lyman-alpha spectra and surface brightness profiles, and degeneracies between the parameters. We also find a parameter set that best reproduces simultaneously the observed spectra and surface brightness profiles of the MUSE Lyman-alpha halos.

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