THE COS-DWARFS SURVEY: THE CARBON RESERVOIR AROUND SUB-L* GALAXIES

By R. Bordoloi, Jason Tumlinson, Jessica Werk, B. Oppenheimer, Molly Peeples, J. Xavier Prochaska, T. Tripp, Neal Katz, R. Davé, A. J. Fox and 5 more. 2014

155 citations recorded by the source corpus.

We report new observations of circumgalactic gas from the COS-Dwarfs survey, a systematic investigation of the gaseous halos around 43 low-mass z ⩽ 0.1 galaxies using background QSOs observed with the Cosmic Origins Spectrograph. From the projected one-dimensional and two-dimensional distribution of C iv absorption, we find that C iv is detected out to ≈100 kpc (corresponding roughly to ≈0.5 Rvir) of the host galaxies. The C iv absorption strength falls off radially as a power law, and beyond ≈0.5 Rvir, no C iv absorption is detected above our sensitivity limit of ≈50–100 mÅ. We find a tentative correlation between detected C iv absorption strength and star formation, paralleling the strong correlation seen in highly ionized oxygen for L ∼ L* galaxies by the COS-Halos survey. The data imply a large carbon reservoir in the circumgalactic medium (CGM) of these galaxies, corresponding to a minimum carbon mass of ≳ 1.2 × 106 M☉ out to ∼110 kpc. This mass is comparable to the carbon mass in the interstellar medium and exceeds the carbon mass currently in the stars of these galaxies. The C iv absorption seen around these sub-L* galaxies can account for almost two-thirds of all Wr ⩾ 100 mÅ C iv absorption detected at low z. Comparing the C iv covering fraction with hydrodynamical simulations, we find that an energy-driven wind model is consistent with the observations whereas a wind model of constant velocity fails to reproduce the CGM or the galaxy properties.

Subfields: Astronomy and Astrophysics

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/e84a0e05049879f79cc40adac9f32cadc0b0b307

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Citations in the corpus

The COS-Halos Survey: Metallicities in the Low-redshift Circumgalactic Medium (2017, background): “As larger surveys and datasets were compiled, it became clear that the present-day CGM accounts for the majority if not all of the detected metal absorption (Cooksey et al. 2010; Prochaska et al. 2011; Bordoloi et al. 2014; Lehner et al. 2015).”
Bimodality of low-redshift circumgalactic O VI in non-equilibrium EAGLE zoom simulations (2016, background): “Several HST programs have exploited this new capability to investigate the gaseous environments of a sample of low-z haloes, including COS-Halos (Tumlinson et al. 2013), COS-Dwarfs (Bordoloi et al. 2014), and COS-GASS (Borthakur et al. 2015).”
The impact of star formation feedback on the circumgalactic medium (2016, methodology): “Bearing this in mind, the Ovi and C iv column densities of our haloes are close to the observed values (Tumlinson et al. 2011; Bordoloi et al. 2014).”
The Circumgalactic Medium (2017, methodology): “…approach chooses background sources because they probe particular foreground structures, such as L∗ galaxies (Tumlinson et al. 2013), sub-L∗ galaxies (Bordoloi et al. 2014b), galaxies with known ISM content (Borthakur et al. 2015), or groups and filaments (Wakker et al. 2015; Tejos et al. 2016),…”
Probing Galactic Halos with Fast Radio Bursts (2019, background): “Furthermore, the community awaits results from ongoing surveys to estimate McoolCGM for sub-L∗ and dwarf galaxies (e.g. Bordoloi et al. 2014).”
First results from the TNG50 simulation: galactic outflows driven by supernovae and black hole feedback (2019, background): “…detection of outflow signatures along the minor axes of galaxies is a common conclusion at low-z (Heckman et al. 2000) based on SDSS (Chen et al. 2010; Concas et al. 2017; Bae & Woo 2018) and also towards z ∼ 1 (Martin et al. 2012; Kornei et al. 2012; Bordoloi et al. 2014b; Rubin et al. 2014).”