Physical properties of galactic winds using background quasars

By N. Bouché, W. Hohensee, R. Vargas, G. Kacprzak, C. Martin, J. Cooke, C. W. C. Ucsb, Irap Toulouse, Adolfo Camarillo High School, Oak Park High School and 2 more. 2011

188 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Background quasars are potentially sensitive probes of galactic outflows provided that one can determine the origin of the absorbing material since both gaseous disks and strong bipolar outflows can contribute to the absorption cross-section. Using a dozen quasars passing near spectroscopically identified galaxies at z 0:1, we find that the azimuthal orientation of the quasar sight-lines with strong Mg II absorption (withW 2796 r > 0:3 ˚ A) is bi-modal: about half the Mg II sight-lines are aligned with the major axis and the other half are within = 30 of the minor axis, suggesting that bipolar outflows can contribute to the Mg II cross-section. This bi-modality is also present in the instantaneous star-formation rates (SFRs) of the hosts. For the sight-lines aligned along the minor axis, a simple bi-conical wind model is indeed able to reproduce the observed Mg II kinematics and the Mg II dependence with impact parameter b, (W 2796 r / b 1 ). Using our wind model, we can directly extract key wind properties such as the de-projected outflow speed Vout of the cool material traced by Mg II and the outflow rates _ Mout. The outflow speeds Vout are found to be 150-300 kms 1 , i.e. of the order of the circular velocity, and smaller than the escape velocity by a factor of 2. The outflow rates _ Mout are typically two to three times the instantaneous SFRs. Our results demonstrate how background quasars can be used to measure wind properties with high precision.

Subfields: Astronomy and Astrophysics

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/30ef421e7a6fb6f362db070f0cab880981bfe18f

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In Astronomy and Astrophysics

1. P. Hopkins
2. L. Hernquist
3. R. Dav'e
4. T. Naab
5. R. Somerville
6. E. Quataert
7. A. Dekel
8. Volker Springel

Citations in the corpus

• THE MULTIPHASE STRUCTURE AND POWER SOURCES OF GALACTIC WINDS IN MAJOR MERGERS (2013, unknown): “Systems with star formation rate (SFR) ∼ 1 M yr−1 show Ω/4π ∼ 0.1 (Chen et al. 2010; Bouché et al. 2012), nearby LIRGs (SFR = 7− 70 M yr−1) have Ω/4π ∼ 0.4 (Rupke et al. 2005c), and nearby ULIRGs (SFR & 70 M yr−1) have Ω/4π ∼ 0.8 (Rupke et al. 2002, 2005c; Martin 2005).”
• THE BIMODAL METALLICITY DISTRIBUTION OF THE COOL CIRCUMGALACTIC MEDIUM AT z ≲ 1 (2013, background): “…galaxy disks (e.g., Dekel & Birnboim 2006; Stewart et al. 2011b; Rubin et al. 2012; Shen et al. 2013), while on the other hand, stellar feedback in galaxies tends to be bi-conical, near perpendicular to the galaxy major axis (e.g., Strickland et al. 2004; Bouché et al. 2012; Brook et al. 2011).”
• CHARACTERIZING THE CIRCUMGALACTIC MEDIUM OF NEARBY GALAXIES WITH HST/COS AND HST/STIS ABSORPTION-LINE SPECTROSCOPY (2012, background): “…in this sample); (3) the position angle on the sky relative to the galaxy orientation (i.e., absorber projected closer to the major or minor axis; Bouché et al. 2012) as shown in Figure 6 (39 absorbers have these data); and (4) absorber velocity relative to its host galaxy as a fraction of…”
• DEMOGRAPHICS AND PHYSICAL PROPERTIES OF GAS OUTFLOWS/INFLOWS AT 0.4 < z < 1.4 (2012, background): “New evidence for a bimodal distribution of azimuthal angles among strong Mg II systems (Bouché et al. 2012; Kacprzak et al. 2012) supports our conclusions that outflows (minor axis absorption) make a substantial contribution to the population of intervening absorbers.”
• Bimodality of low-redshift circumgalactic O VI in non-equilibrium EAGLE zoom simulations (2016, background): “…blue-shifted, low-ion absorption wings extending to at most a few hundred km s−1 from the galaxy, almost always at velocities unable to escape the gravitational potential of the halo (e.g. Bouché et al. 2012; Martin et al. 2012; Rubin et al. 2014; Chisholm et al. 2015; Nielsen et al. 2015).”
• UNLEASHING POSITIVE FEEDBACK: LINKING THE RATES OF STAR FORMATION, SUPERMASSIVE BLACK HOLE ACCRETION, AND OUTFLOWS IN DISTANT GALAXIES (2013, background): “This coupling is also true for star-forming galaxies without strong AGNs (Bouché et al. 2012).”
• TRACING OUTFLOWS AND ACCRETION: A BIMODAL AZIMUTHAL DEPENDENCE OF Mg ii ABSORPTION (2012, unknown): “Our result confirms the innovatory work of Bouché et al. (2012) based upon 10 galaxies.”
• THE SINS/zC-SINF SURVEY of z ∼ 2 GALAXY KINEMATICS: OUTFLOW PROPERTIES (2012, background): “…local starbursts (Heckman et al. 1990; Veilleux et al. 2005; Chen et al. 2010) and high-z SFGs (Pettini et al. 2000; Weiner et al. 2009; Steidel et al. 2010; Genzel et al. 2011; Bouché et al. 2012), as well as theoretical predictions (Murray et al. 2005; Davé et al. 2011; Hopkins et al. 2012).”
• How Stellar Feedback Simultaneously Regulates Star Formation and Drives Outflows (2015, unknown): “…et al. 1964; Heckman et al. 1990, 2000, 2015; Martin 1996, 1998, 1999, 2005, 2006; Weiner et al. 2009; Steidel et al. 2010; Bordoloi et al. 2011; Martin et al. 2012; Bouché et al. 2012; Diamond-Stanic et al. 2012; Leitherer et al. 2013; Chisholm et al. 2014; seeVeilleux et al. 2005for a review).”
• Gusty, gaseous flows of FIRE: Galactic winds in cosmological simulations with explicit stellar feedback (2015, background): “…of kinematically distinct material from the rest frame of the host galaxy via Doppler shifted emission (e.g. Martin 1998) and absorption lines (e.g. Heckman et al. 2000; Grimes et al. 2009; Weiner et al. 2009; Steidel et al. 2010; Bouché et al. 2012; Martin et al. 2012; Rubin et al. 2014).”
• EVIDENCE FOR UBIQUITOUS COLLIMATED GALACTIC-SCALE OUTFLOWS ALONG THE STAR-FORMING SEQUENCE AT z ∼ 0.5 (2013, background): “1 is suggestive of wind collimation (Bordoloi et al. 2011; Bouché et al. 2012; Kacprzak et al. 2012).”
• EVIDENCE FOR WIDE-SPREAD ACTIVE GALACTIC NUCLEUS-DRIVEN OUTFLOWS IN THE MOST MASSIVE z ∼ 1–2 STAR-FORMING GALAXIES (2014, background): “…of Mg ii absorber occurrence and profiles as a function of inclination of the host galaxy (Bordoloi et al. 2011; Kacprzak et al. 2011, 2012; Bouché et al. 2012), as well as theoretical work on both energy and momentum driven outflows (Veilleux et al. 2005; Murray et al. 2005; Hopkins et…”