The Cosmic Ultraviolet Baryon Survey (CUBS). VII. On the Warm-hot Circumgalactic Medium Probed by O vi and Ne viii at 0.4 ≲ z ≲ 0.7

Zhijie Qu*, Hsiao Wen Chen, Sean D. Johnson, Gwen C. Rudie, Fakhri S. Zahedy, David DePalma, Joop Schaye, Erin T. Boettcher, Sebastiano Cantalupo, Mandy C. Chen, Claude André Faucher-Giguère, Jennifer I.Hsiu Li, John S. Mulchaey, Patrick Petitjean, Marc Rafelski

*Corresponding author for this work

Research output: Contribution to journalArticlepeer-review

2 Scopus citations

Abstract

This paper presents a newly established sample of 103 unique galaxies or galaxy groups at 0.4 ≲ z ≲ 0.7 from the Cosmic Ultraviolet Baryon Survey (CUBS) for studying the warm-hot circumgalactic medium (CGM) probed by both O vi and Ne viii absorption. The galaxies and associated neighbors are identified at <1 physical Mpc from the sightlines toward 15 CUBS QSOs at z QSO ≳ 0.8. A total of 30 galaxies or galaxy groups exhibit associated O vi λ λ 1031, 1037 doublet absorption within a line-of-sight velocity interval of ±250 km s−1, while the rest show no trace of O vi to a detection limit of log N OVI / cm − 2 ≈ 13.7 . Meanwhile, only five galaxies or galaxy groups exhibit the Ne viii λ λ 770, 780 doublet absorption, down to a limiting column density of log N NeVIII / cm − 2 ≈ 14.0 . These O vi- and Ne viii-bearing halos reside in different galaxy environments with stellar masses ranging from log M star / M ⊙ ≈ 8 to ≈11.5. The warm-hot CGM around galaxies of different stellar masses and star formation rates exhibits different spatial profiles and kinematics. In particular, star-forming galaxies with log M star / M ⊙ ≈ 9 - 11 show a significant concentration of metal-enriched warm-hot CGM within the virial radius, while massive quiescent galaxies exhibit flatter radial profiles of both column densities and covering fractions. In addition, the velocity dispersion of O vi absorption is broad with σ υ > 40 km s−1 for galaxies of log M star / M ⊙ > 9 within the virial radius, suggesting a more dynamic warm-hot halo around these galaxies. Finally, the warm-hot CGM probed by O vi and Ne viii is suggested to be the dominant phase in sub-L* galaxies with log M star / M ⊙ ≈ 9 - 10 based on their high ionization fractions in the CGM.

Original languageEnglish (US)
Article number8
JournalAstrophysical Journal
Volume968
Issue number1
DOIs
StatePublished - Jun 1 2024

Funding

We thank the anonymous referee for a careful review and valuable suggestions that significantly improved our work. The authors thank Jonathan Stern for sharing their models of N NeVIII/N OVI ratio in L* galaxies. Z.Q. acknowledges partial support from HST-GO-15163.001A, NSF AST-1715692 grants, and NASA ADAP grant 80NSSC22K0481. H.W.C. and M.C.C. acknowledge partial support from HST-GO-15163.001A and NSF AST-1715692 grants. S.D.J. acknowledges partial support from HST-GO-15280.009A. G.C.R. acknowledges partial support from HST-GO-15163.015A. F.S.Z. acknowledges the support of a Carnegie Fellowship from the Observatories of the Carnegie Institution for Science. D.D. acknowledges the support of the John A. Lyons Fellowship from MIT's Office of Graduate Education. E.B. acknowledges partial support from NASA under award No. 80GSFC21M0002. S.C. gratefully acknowledges support from the European Research Council (ERC) under the European Unions Horizon 2020 research and innovation program grant agreement No 864361. CAFG was supported by NSF through grants AST-2108230, AST-2307327, and CAREER award AST-1652522; by NASA through grants 17-ATP17-0067 and 21-ATP21-0036; by STScI through grants HST-GO-16730.016-A and JWSTAR-03252.001-A; and by CXO through grant TM2-23005X. J.I.L. is supported by the Eric and Wendy Schmidt AI in Science Postdoctoral Fellowship, a Schmidt Futures program. This work is based on observations made with ESO Telescopes at the Paranal Observatory under program ID 0104.A-0147(A), observations made with the 6.5 m Magellan Telescopes located at Las Campanas Observatory, and spectroscopic data gathered under the HST-GO-15163.01A program using the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope operated by the Space Telescope Science Institute and the Association of Universities for Research in Astronomy, Inc., under NASA contract NAS 5-26555. This research has made use of the services of the ESO Science Archive Facility and the Astrophysics Data Service (ADS). 1616 https://ui.adsabs.harvard.edu The analysis in this work was greatly facilitated by the following Python packages: NumPy (Harris et al. 2020), SciPy (Virtanen et al. 2020), Astropy (Astropy Collaboration et al. 2013; Price-Whelan et al. 2018), Matplotlib (Hunter 2007), and emcee (Foreman-Mackey et al. 2013). We thank the anonymous referee for a careful review and valuable suggestions that significantly improved our work. The authors thank Jonathan Stern for sharing their models of N / N ratio in L* galaxies. Z.Q. acknowledges partial support from HST-GO-15163.001A, NSF AST-1715692 grants, and NASA ADAP grant 80NSSC22K0481. H.W.C. and M.C.C. acknowledge partial support from HST-GO-15163.001A and NSF AST-1715692 grants. S.D.J. acknowledges partial support from HST-GO-15280.009A. G.C.R. acknowledges partial support from HST-GO-15163.015A. F.S.Z. acknowledges the support of a Carnegie Fellowship from the Observatories of the Carnegie Institution for Science. D.D. acknowledges the support of the John A. Lyons Fellowship from MIT's Office of Graduate Education. E.B. acknowledges partial support from NASA under award No. 80GSFC21M0002. S.C. gratefully acknowledges support from the European Research Council (ERC) under the European Unions Horizon 2020 research and innovation program grant agreement No 864361. CAFG was supported by NSF through grants AST-2108230, AST-2307327, and CAREER award AST-1652522; by NASA through grants 17-ATP17-0067 and 21-ATP21-0036; by STScI through grants HST-GO-16730.016-A and JWSTAR-03252.001-A; and by CXO through grant TM2-23005X. J.I.L. is supported by the Eric and Wendy Schmidt AI in Science Postdoctoral Fellowship, a Schmidt Futures program. This work is based on observations made with ESO Telescopes at the Paranal Observatory under program ID 0104.A-0147(A), observations made with the 6.5 m Magellan Telescopes located at Las Campanas Observatory, and spectroscopic data gathered under the HST-GO-15163.01A program using the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope operated by the Space Telescope Science Institute and the Association of Universities for Research in Astronomy, Inc., under NASA contract NAS 5-26555. This research has made use of the services of the ESO Science Archive Facility and the Astrophysics Data Service (ADS). NeVIII OVI

ASJC Scopus subject areas

  • Astronomy and Astrophysics
  • Space and Planetary Science

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