THE COS-HALOS SURVEY: RATIONALE, DESIGN, AND A CENSUS OF CIRCUMGALACTIC NEUTRAL HYDROGEN

By Jason Tumlinson, C. Thom, Jessica Werk, J. Xavier Prochaska, T. Tripp, Neal Katz, R. Davé, B. Oppenheimer, J. Meiring, A. B. Ford and 4 more. 2013

242 citations recorded by the source corpus.

We present the design and methods of the COS-Halos survey, a systematic investigation of the gaseous halos of 44 z = 0.15–0.35 galaxies using background QSOs observed with the Cosmic Origins Spectrograph aboard the Hubble Space Telescope. This survey has yielded 39 spectra of zem ≃ 0.5 QSOs with S/N ∼10–15 per resolution element. The QSO sightlines pass within 150 physical kpc of the galaxies, which span early and late types over stellar mass log M*/M☉ = 9.5–11.5. We find that the circumgalactic medium exhibits strong H i, averaging ≃ 1 Å in Lyα equivalent width out to 150 kpc, with 100% covering fraction for star-forming galaxies and 75% covering for passive galaxies. We find good agreement in column densities between this survey and previous studies over similar range of impact parameter. There is weak evidence for a difference between early- and late-type galaxies in the strength and distribution of H i. Kinematics indicate that the detected material is bound to the host galaxy, such that ≳ 90% of the detected column density is confined within ±200 km s−1 of the galaxies. This material generally exists well below the halo virial temperatures at T ≲ 105 K. We evaluate a number of possible origin scenarios for the detected material, and in the end favor a simple model in which the bulk of the detected H i arises in a bound, cool, low-density photoionized diffuse medium that is generic to all L* galaxies and may harbor a total gaseous mass comparable to galactic stellar masses.

Subfields: Astronomy and Astrophysics, Instrumentation

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/6212df8630dd59b93e4286a1cfc50a001f51f395

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Citations in the corpus

THE COS-HALOS SURVEY: PHYSICAL CONDITIONS AND BARYONIC MASS IN THE LOW-REDSHIFT CIRCUMGALACTIC MEDIUM (2014, methodology): “We use the HI column densities presented by Tumlinson et al. (2013), also based on the AODM calculations, except for damped systems which are based on Voigt profile fits.”
Figuring Out Gas & Galaxies in Enzo (FOGGIE). I. Resolving Simulated Circumgalactic Absorption at 2 ≤ z ≤ 2.5 (2018, result): “…et al. (2019) similarly found that improving circumgalactic resolution increased the amount of H I and the incidence of strong H I absorbers, bringing their simulated galaxies more in line with the COSHalos z∼0.25 H I observations (Thom et al. 2012; Tumlinson et al. 2013; Prochaska et al. 2017).”
The COS-Halos Survey: Metallicities in the Low-redshift Circumgalactic Medium (2017, methodology): “This was especially the case for the COS-Halos survey (Tumlinson et al. 2011; Werk et al. 2012; Tumlinson et al. 2013) which analyzed the CGM of z ∼ 0.2, field L∗ galaxies at impact parameters R⊥ < 150 kpc.”
Bimodality of low-redshift circumgalactic O VI in non-equilibrium EAGLE zoom simulations (2016, methodology): “This was for example the case for the J2257+1340 sight line where two smaller star-forming galaxies were subsequently observed closer to a 1010.9M passive galaxy at 114 kpc (Tumlinson et al. 2013).”
THE COS-DWARFS SURVEY: THE CARBON RESERVOIR AROUND SUB-L* GALAXIES (2014, methodology): “In this study, akin to the COS-Halos survey, we adopt a “galaxy selected” approach (Bordoloi et al. 2011; Tumlinson et al. 2013).”
A BUDGET AND ACCOUNTING OF METALS AT z ∼ 0: RESULTS FROM THE COS-HALOS SURVEY (2013, methodology): “As described by Tumlinson et al. (2013), COS-Halos was designed to cover galaxies both with and without active star formation, in the range logM⊙/M⊙ ∼ 9–11.5.”
Probing Galactic Halos with Fast Radio Bursts (2019, methodology): “A long-standing technique has been to apply similar techniques used to assess the IGM, i.e. absorption-line analysis of sightlines that coincidentally intersect galactic halos (e.g. Lanzetta et al. 1995; Prochaska et al. 2011; Tumlinson et al. 2013).”
Physical Models of Galaxy Formation in a Cosmological Framework (2014, background): “…UV is now able to probe the diffuse gas and metals in the circumgalactic medium of galaxies for galaxy-targetted sightlines spanning a diverse range of galaxy types, from nearby galaxies to z ∼ 2–3 (e.g. Peeples et al. 2014, Prochaska et al. 2013, Rudie et al. 2012, Tumlinson et al. 2013).”
Cosmological simulations of the circumgalactic medium with 1 kpc resolution: enhanced H i column densities (2018, background): “The vertical dotted, grey line indicates the minimum column density for LLSs (NH I ≥ 1017.2 cm−2) and the black error bars show the covering fractions in the COS-Halos survey (Tumlinson et al. 2013; Prochaska et al. 2017).”
Star formation sustained by gas accretion (2014, background): “In a systematic search for such systems, Tumlinson et al. (2013) find absorption in all star-forming galaxies, with a detection rate as large as 75 % for the early types and 100% for late types.”
THE COS-HALOS SURVEY: ORIGINS OF THE HIGHLY IONIZED CIRCUMGALACTIC MEDIUM OF STAR-FORMING GALAXIES (2016, methodology): “We assume an absolute velocity calibration error due to the systematic uncertainty in the COS wavelength calibra- 1 2 1 2 tion of ±10 km s−1 (Tumlinson et al. 2013).”
The Circumgalactic Medium (2017, background): “One of the most surprising results to emerge from Tumlinson et al. (2011) is that O vi appears to be absent around the non–star-forming, more massive galaxies in the COS-Halos sample.”
The impact of star formation feedback on the circumgalactic medium (2016, methodology): “Here we briefly present additional analysis of our simulations for comparison to quasar absorption observations of the z ∼ 0 CGM (e.g., Tumlinson et al. 2013; Stocke et al. 2013).”