The broadening of Lyman-α forest absorption lines

Garzilli, A.; Theuns, T.; Schaye, J.

Abstract

We provide an analytical description of the line broadening of H I absorbers in the Lyman-α forest resulting from Doppler broadening and Jeans smoothing. We demonstrate that our relation captures the dependence of the line width on column density for narrow lines in z ∼ 3 mock spectra remarkably well. Broad lines at a given column density arise when the underlying density structure is more complex, and such clustering is not captured by our model. Our understanding of the line broadening opens the way to a new method to characterize the thermal state of the intergalactic medium and to determine the sizes of the absorbing structures.

Citation

Garzilli, A., Theuns, T., & Schaye, J. (2015). The broadening of Lyman-α forest absorption lines. Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society, 450(2), 1465-1476. https://doi.org/10.1093/mnras/stv394

• Journal Article Type: Article
• Acceptance Date: Feb 20, 2015
• Publication Date: Jun 21, 2015
• Deposit Date: Feb 10, 2016
• Publicly Available Date: Feb 19, 2016
• Journal: Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society
• Print ISSN: 0035-8711
• Electronic ISSN: 1365-2966
• Publisher: Royal Astronomical Society
• Peer Reviewed: Peer Reviewed
• Volume: 450
• Issue: 2
• Pages: 1465-1476
• DOI: https://doi.org/10.1093/mnras/stv394
• Keywords: Intergalactic medium, Quasars: absorption lines, Large-scale structure of Universe.
• Public URL: https://durham-repository.worktribe.com/output/1412520