Very extended cold gas, star formation and outflows in the halo of a bright QSO at z>6
By C. Cicone, R. Maiolino, S. Gallerani, R. Neri, A. Ferrara, E. Sturm, Fabrizio Fiore, E. Piconcelli, C. Feruglio. 2014
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Past observations of QSO host galaxies at z >6 have found cold gas and star formation on compact scales of a few kiloparsecs. We present new high sensitivity IRAM PdBI follow-up observations of the [CII] 158micron emission line and FIR continuum in the host galaxy of SDSS J1148+5152, a luminous QSO at redshift 6.4189. We find that a large fraction of the gas traced by [CII] is at high velocities, up to ~1400 km/s relative to the systemic velocity, confirming the presence of a major quasar-driven outflow indicated by previous observations. The outflow has a complex morphology and reaches a maximum projected radius of ~30 kpc. The extreme spatial extent of the outflow allows us, for the first time in an external galaxy, to estimate mass-loss rate, kinetic power and momentum rate of the outflow as a function of the projected distance from the nucleus and the dynamical time-scale. These trends reveal multiple outflow events during the past 100 Myr, although the bulk of the mass, energy and momentum appear to have been released more recently, within the past ~20 Myr. Surprisingly, we discover that also the quiescent gas at systemic velocity is extremely extended. More specifically, we find that, while 30% of the [CII] within v\in(-200, 200) km/s traces a compact component that is not resolved by our observations, 70% of the [CII] emission in this velocity range is extended, with a projected FWHM size of 17.4+-1.4 kpc. We detect FIR continuum emission associated with both the compact and the extended [CII] components, although the extended FIR emission has a FWHM of 11+-3 kpc, thus smaller than the extended [CII] source. Overall, our results indicate that the cold gas traced by [CII] is distributed up to r~30 kpc. A large fraction of extended [CII] is likely associated with star formation on large scales, but the [CII] source extends well beyond the FIR continuum.
Subfields: Astronomy and Astrophysics, Instrumentation
View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/9c684c2b96072f0fa943fff50d0b6d73658dea6e
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Citations in the corpus
- The COSMOS2015 galaxy stellar mass function . Thirteen billion years of stellar mass assembly in ten snapshots (2017, background): “Their CO and [CII] mapping indicates that, although AGN are able to remove a large amount of molecular gas (Maiolino et al. 2012; Cicone et al. 2014), they do not prevent extended cold clouds from fueling star formation (Cicone et al. 2015).”
- An ALMA [C ii] Survey of 27 Quasars at z > 5.94 (2018, methodology): “…al. 2006; Carilli et al. 2010; Eilers et al. 2017), and to probe the gas kinematics (thus inferring the dynamical mass of the host galaxy, or exposing the presence of outflows and winds; see, e.g., Venemans et al. 2012, 2016; Wang et al. 2013, 2016; Willott et al. 2013, 2015; Cicone et al. 2015).”
- Ionised outflows in z $\sim$ 2.4 quasar host galaxies (2015, background): “…Zaurín et al. 2014; Aalto et al. 2015; Feruglio et al. 2015) and at high redshift (e.g. Alexander et al. 2010; Nesvadba et al. 2011; Harrison et al. 2012; Maiolino et al. 2012; CanoDíaz et al. 2012; Harrison et al. 2014; Cresci et al. 2015; Cicone et al. 2015) in ionised, atomic and molecular gas.”
- AGN wind scaling relations and the co-evolution of black holes and galaxies (2017, methodology): “…489 vmax(OH) = 950, Veilleux et al. 2013, vmax(CO) = 600 km s−1 Cicone et al. 2014; I23365, v84(OH) = 604 km s−1, vmax(OH) = 1300 km s−1, Veilleux et al. 2013; vmax(CO) = 600 km s−1, Cicone et al. 2014; IC 5063, v84(OH) = 309 km s−1, Stone et al. 2016; vmax(CO) = 400 km s−1, Morganti et al. 2013).”